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diff --git a/42225-0.txt b/42225-0.txt index 41255c1..7bd03ba 100644 --- a/42225-0.txt +++ b/42225-0.txt @@ -1,32 +1,4 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42225 *** THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN @@ -7953,364 +7925,4 @@ walk the stage as poets do. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - -BY - -VAN WYCK BROOKS - - -"_Think it over, dear B--! A man's gifts are_ -_not a property: they are a duty."_ - ---IBSEN'S _Letters_ - - -1922 - -LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN - - - - -TO E.S.B. - - - - -CONTENTS - - - - I. INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - II. THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - III. THE GILDED AGE - IV. IN THE CRUCIBLE - V. THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - VI. EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - VII. THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - VIII. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - IX. MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - X. LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - XI. MUSTERED OUT - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - - - - -CHAPTER I - -INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - - - "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the - deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the - race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and - for the same reason."--_Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's - books._ - - -To those who are interested in American life and letters there has been -no question of greater significance, during the last few years, than the -pessimism of Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his own -friends and contemporaries were rather inclined to make light of his -oft-expressed belief that man is the meanest of the animals and life a -tragic mistake. - -For some time before his death Mark Twain had appeared before the public -in the rôle less of a laughing philosopher than of a somewhat gloomy -prophet of modern civilization. But he was old and he had suffered many -misfortunes and the progress of society is not a matter for any one to -be very jubilant about: to be gloomy about the world is a sort of -prerogative of those who have lived long and thought much. The public -that had grown old with him could hardly, therefore, accept at its face -value a point of view that seemed to be contradicted by so many of the -facts of Mark Twain's life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him -intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of -his "pose" regarding "the damned human race," and we know the opinion of -his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was "not a pessimist in his -heart, but only by premeditation." These views were apparently borne out -by his own testimony. "My temperament," he wrote, shortly after the -death of his daughter Jean, "has never allowed my spirits to remain -depressed long at a time." That he remained active and buoyant to the -end was, in fact, for his associates, sufficient evidence that his -philosophical despair was only an anomaly, which had no organic part in -the structure of his life. - -Was it not natural that they should feel thus about him, those -contemporaries of his, so few of whom had seen his later writings and -all the tell-tale private memoranda which Mr. Paine has lately given to -the world? What a charmed life was Mark Twain's, after all! To be able -to hold an immense nation in the hollow of one's hand, to be able to -pour out into millions of sympathetic ears, with calm confidence, as -into the ears of a faithful friend, all the private griefs and intimate -humors of a lifetime, to be called "the King" by those one loves, to be -so much more than a king in reality that every attack of gout one has is -"good for a column" in the newspapers and every phrase one utters -girdles the world in twenty minutes, to be addressed as "the Messiah of -a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents"--what -more could Tom Sawyer, at least, have wished than that? And Mark Twain's -fame was not merely one of sentiment. If the public heart was moved by -everything that concerned him,--an illness in his household, a new -campaign against political corruption, a change of residence, and he was -deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won -the world's pity when he got into debt and the world's praise when he -got out of it, he was no sort of nine days' wonder; his country had made -him its "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in -appointing himself, as he said, "ambassador-at-large of the United -States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all -official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over "The -Innocents Abroad" and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices -to the day when the newspapers were freely proposing that he ought to -have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the -Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first -time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and -private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and -his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his -opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a -sort of incarnation of the character and quality of modern America. -"Everywhere he moved," says Mr. Paine, "a world revolved about him." In -London, in Vienna, his apartments were a court, and traffic rules were -modified to let him pass in the street. A charmed life, surely, when we -consider, in addition to this public acclaim, the tidal waves of wealth -that flowed in upon him again and again, the intense happiness of his -family relations, and the splendid recognition of those fellow-members -of his craft whose word to him was final--Kipling, who "loved to think -of the great and godlike Clemens," and Brander Matthews, who freely -compared him with the greatest writers of history, and Bernard Shaw, who -announced that America had produced just two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe -and Mark Twain. Finally, there was Mr. Howells, "the recognized critical -Court of Last Resort in this country," as he called him. Did not Mr. -Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: "Your foundations -are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, -and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"? - -The spectators of this drama could hardly have been expected to take -the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously, and all the more because he -totally refuted the old and popular notion that humorists are always -melancholy. I have already quoted the remark he made about his -temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life, four months -before his own death. It is borne out by all the evidence of all his -years. He was certainly not one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue -natures, those June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day -long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He was an August nature, -given to sudden storms and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with -electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, -and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he -was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child -in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter -where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope -preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine -temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," -he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this -footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly _happy_ -than I am I defy the world to produce him and _prove_ him." And it seems -always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in his triumphs on the -platform or indulging his "rainbow-hued impulses" on paper, we see him -again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he was -expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress assembled, -"happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in -his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: -"Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know -my temperament"? - -And his physical health was just what one might expect from this, from -his immense vitality. He was subject to bronchial colds and he had -intermittent attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his health -appears to have been as perfect as his energy was inexhaustible. "I have -been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years," he writes -in 1875; from all one gathers he might have made the same statement -twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at fifty, at -sixty, at seventy--during that extraordinary period, well within the -memory of people who are still young, when he had solved his financial -difficulties by going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine says, -"like a debutante in her first season,"--the days when people called him -"the Belle of New York": "By half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had -danced all those people down--and yet was not tired, merely breathless. -I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at -work on this letter to you." And again, the next year, his sixtieth -year, when he had been playing billiards with H.H. Rogers, until Rogers -looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you ever get tired?": "I was -able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like. Don't you -remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the -villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I -get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one -daylight nap since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testimony -of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, during the last five -years of his life when, even at seventy-four, he was still playing -billiards "9 hours a day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human -being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a -young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the -night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh -and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He -smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the -billiard-table with the light step of youth. At 3 or 4 o'clock in the -morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my -weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of -his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least -suggestion of fatigue." - -Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his intimates, had ever -in their eyes,--this darling of all the gods. No wonder they were -inclined to take his view of "the damned human race" as rather a -whimsical pose; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it so even -if they had known, generally known, that he had a way of referring in -private to "God's most elegant invention" as not only "damned" but also -"mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are always supposed to be -that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about -the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an -abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to -explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its -stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and -Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment." -All his closest friends were accustomed to little notes like this: "I -have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing -that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and -hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put -in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race." -Might not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that? - -Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's writings which only a -succeeding generation can really have, it might be possible to explain -in this objective way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism -which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The change in tone -between the poetry of the first half of "Life on the Mississippi" and -the dull notation of the latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp -Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," -with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," -that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, -along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the -reader for taking his text at its face value--all this might be -attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and -family sorrow. If he was always manifesting, in word and deed, his deep -belief that life is inevitably a process of deterioration,--well, did -not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it not, is it not, a -popular American dogma that "the baddest children are better than the -goodest men"? A race of people who feel this way could not have thought -there was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims like these: - - If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he - will not bite you. This is the principal difference between - a dog and a man. - - It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to - hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other - to get the news to you. - -They could hardly have been surprised at the bitter, yes, even the -vindictive, mockery of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," at Mark -Twain's definition of man as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted -neither "to supply the coffee nor turn the crank," at his recurring -"plan" to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the -air for a period of two minutes. - -Has not the American public, with its invincible habit of "turning -hell's back-yard into a playground," gone so far even as to discount -"The Mysterious Stranger," that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole -of cruel nonsense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank -assertion that slavery, hypocrisy and cowardice are the eternal destiny -of man? Professor Stuart P. Sherman, who likes to defend the views of -thirty years ago and sometimes seems to forget that all traditions are -not of equal validity, says of this book that it "lets one into a -temperament and character of more gravity, complexity and interest than -the surfaces indicated." But having made this discovery, for he is -openly surprised, Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and -unexpected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had known before: "What -Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in monarchies, -aristocracies, tribal religions and--minorities bent on mischief, and -making a bludgeon of the malleable many." And, after all, he says, "the -wicked world visited by the mysterious stranger is sixteenth century -Austria--not these States." But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in -reality Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through -whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations of Huck Finn and Tom -Sawyer, those characters which, as we know from a hundred evidences, -haunted Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any rate, Mark -Twain's boys, and whoever compares their moral attitude with that of the -boys of Mark Twain's prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into -his soul. "We boys wanted to warn them"--Marget and Ursula, against the -danger that was gathering about them--"but we backed down when it came -to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor -brave enough to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get us into trouble." What, is this Mark Twain speaking, the -creator of Huck and Tom, who gladly broke every law of the tribe to -protect and rescue Nigger Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly enough nor -brave enough" to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get them into trouble? Can we, in the light of this, continue to -say that Mark Twain's pessimism was due to anything so external as the -hatred of tyranny, and a sixteenth century Austrian tyranny at that? Is -it not perfectly plain that that deep contempt for man, the -"coffee-mill," a contempt that has spread now even to the boy-nature of -which Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have had some -far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate -chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not -the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no -relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist: - - Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. - - All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange - complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to - live. - - Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all - his others--his last breath. - -And that paragraph about the death of his daughter, so utterly -inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes to himself: "My life is a -bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most -precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor ---death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to -life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; -and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions, to -one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that: but at least one of -them is that, not to the writer's apprehension, but in the writer's -experience, life has been in some special way a vain affliction. - -Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of Mark Twain's -pessimism? Can we attribute it, with Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt -under which he labored now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the -death of those he loved? No, for these things would have modified his -temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, -checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of -brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own -testimony, the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever knew, he -lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of life he had neither more -nor less than other men, and they affected him neither more nor less. To -say anything else would be to contradict the whole record of his -personality. - -No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted Mark Twain, a -malady common to many Americans, perhaps, if we are to judge from that -excessive interest in therapeutics which he shared with so many millions -of his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark Twain's later -history which has received too little attention. "Whether it was -copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice," -says Mr. Paine--to approach this subject on its broadest side--"he -rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would -provide physical or mental easement for his species." And here again the -general leads to the particular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender -heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts -of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he -and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near -losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in -their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that -momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor -Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method -that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles -about it, bombarding his friends with letters of appreciation and -recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave -most of his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea for all -human ills which osteopathy could not reach." There was Christian -Science to which, in spite of his attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat -equivocal book he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and -as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest converts," who -"never lost faith in its power." And lastly, there was the "eclectic -therapeutic doctrine" which he himself put together piecemeal from all -the others, to the final riddance of _materia medica_. - -We have seen what Mark Twain's apparent health was. Can we say that this -therapeutic obsession was due to the illnesses of his family, which -were, indeed, unending? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant -stimulus to the obsession--the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine," for -instance, did, quite definitely, rise up out of the midst of them. But -it is plain that there had to be an element of "soul-cure" in these -various healings for Mark Twain to be interested in them, that what -interested him in them _was_ the "soul-cure," the "mind-cure." Can he -say too much in praise of Christian Science for its "healing of the -spirit," its gift of "buoyant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from -care"? In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental healing -began at a time when he and his family alike were free from illness. It -is in 1886, when Mark Twain was at the very, summit of his fame, when he -was the most successful publisher in the world, when he was at work on -his most ambitious book, when he was "frightened," as he said, at the -proportions of his prosperity, when his household was aglow with -happiness and well-being, that his daughter Susy notes in her diary: -"Papa has been very much interested of late in the 'mind-cure' theory." -It might be added that he was about at the age when, according to his -famous aphorism, a man who does not become a pessimist knows too little -about life. - -In fact, the more one scans the later pages of Mark Twain's history the -more one is forced to the conclusion that there was something gravely -amiss with his inner life. There was that frequently noted fear of -solitude, that dread of being alone with himself which made him, for -example, beg for just one more game of billiards at 4 o'clock in the -morning. There were those "daily self-eludings" that led him to slay his -own conscience in one of the most ferocious of his humorous tales. That -conscience of his--what was it? Why do so many of his jokes turn upon an -affectation, let us say, of moral cowardice in himself? How does it -happen that when he reads "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him "with -force" is Tito's compromise with his conscience? Why those continual -fits of remorse, those fantastic self-accusations in which he charged -himself, we are told, with having filled Mrs. Clemens's life with -privations, in which he made himself responsible first for the death of -his younger brother and later for that of his daughter Susy, writing to -his wife, according to Mr. Paine, that he was "wholly and solely -responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality -his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-fall, the -separation from Susy, and this final, incredible disaster"? Was there -any reason why, humorously or otherwise, he should have spoken of -himself as a liar, why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of -writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I went on now and took -him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in -literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"? -That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made him come to think -of literature as primarily, perhaps, the confession of sins--was there -anything in the moral point of view of his generation to justify it, in -this greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business, this zealous -reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be -cheaply persuadable" was, he said, the first command the Deity ever -issued to a human being on this planet, the only command Adam would -never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin of one of his -books: "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep -and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he -despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same reason." - -A strange enigma! "You observe," wrote Mark Twain once, almost at the -beginning of his career, "that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." That -spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The restless -movement of his life, those continual journeys to Bermuda, where "the -deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and -give his conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an -autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible," which -would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt -alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense -relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of -limitations--you have served your term, well or less well, and you are -mustered out"--how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? -For Mark Twain was right--things do not happen by chance, and the -psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain -respects that other sort of determinism in which he so almost -fanatically believed. There is no figure for the human being like the -ship, he sometimes said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his -contemporaries, just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory -of that last English welcome, the _Begum_ of Bengal, stateliest of -Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it -merely an irony of circumstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of -storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea? - -No, there was a reason for Mark Twain's pessimism, a reason for that -chagrin, that fear of solitude, that tortured conscience, those -fantastic self-accusations, that indubitable self-contempt. It is an -established fact, if I am not mistaken, that these morbid feelings of -sin, which have no evident cause, are the result of having transgressed -some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one's nature. It is as old as -Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest -that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his -was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked -personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost -wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The -spirit of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from the -bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had never quite been -able to possess. - -Does this seem too rash a hypothesis? It is, I know, the general -impression that Mark Twain quite fully effectuated himself as a writer. -Mr. Howells called him the "Lincoln of our literature," Professor -William Lyon Phelps describes him as one of the supreme novelists of the -world, Professor Brander Matthews compares him with Cervantes, and -Bernard Shaw said to him once: "I am persuaded that the future historian -of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French -historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." These were views -current in Mark Twain's lifetime, and similar views are common enough -to-day. "Mark Twain," says Professor Archibald Henderson, "enjoys the -unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening -and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual -powers from the beginning to the end." To Mr. John Macy, author of what -is, on the whole, the most discerning book that has been written on our -literature, he is "a powerful, original thinker." And finally, Mr. H.L. -Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There -was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof -engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one -associates with the great artists of the Renaissance." An imposing array -of affirmations, surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few -years, during which he has become in a way so much more interesting, -have witnessed a singular change in Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly -present he is in the public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort -of archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not -continue so to be for many generations to comet Undoubtedly. By whom, -however, with the exception of two or three of his books, is he read? -Mr. Paine, I know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this day in -America in larger quantity than any other book of travel. But a number -of explanations might be given for this, as for any other mob -phenomenon, none of which has anything to do with literary fame in the -proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by the delight and -stimulus which he gives to mature spirits in the present, and time, it -seems to me, tends to bear out the assertion of Henry James that Mark -Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry Finn," -"Tom Sawyer," a story or two like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a -sketch or two like "Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of -"Life on the Mississippi,"--these, in any case, can already be said to -have "survived" all his other work. And are these writings, however -beautiful and important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic -genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes? -Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that prevails to-day when he -called their author the "divine amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" -and "Tom Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent, as -complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality." - -So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not -been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled -almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him? When -his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, they -were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they -had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a -creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his -prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of -his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique -magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot -help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American -writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like -Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if -intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth -to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his -associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian -would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the -horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of -one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what -Mr. Howells says: "Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities -that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final -personality was something exquisite." That combination of barbaric force -and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him--is there not -about it something portentous, something that suggests the true lord of -life? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic -atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were -the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their -impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one -of the fixed stars had fallen in space. - -This was the force, this the energy which, through Mark Twain's pen, -found such inadequate expression. He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a -"divine amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called -it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way -of saying, in the latter case, that his was a mind that had not -developed, and in the former, that his was a splendid genius which had -never found itself? - -It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own self-estimate. His -judgments were, as Mr. Paine says, "always unsafe": strictly speaking, -he never knew what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the -time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against -his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark -Twain's estimate of himself it is no conscious judgment of his career -one has in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the judgment of his -unconscious self. This he revealed unawares in all sorts of ways. - -There were times when he seemed to share the complacent confidence of so -many others in his immortal fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his -large, loose, easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live a -couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a -fresh start and live the rest of the time." And Mr. Paine says that as -early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers a -contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one -hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with -his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this -must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty -confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain -was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he -did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of -megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest -rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous -episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I -wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, -I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American -writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident -in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it became a -historic event: it was for him, plainly, of an exceptional significance, -and all his love for gorgeous trappings could never account for the -delight he had in that doctor's gown--"I would dress that way all the -time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine--which became for him a permanent -robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain at seventy-two, one of the most -celebrated men in the world, could not have cared so much for it if it -had been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must have served -in some way also to vindicate him in his own eyes; he seized upon it as -a sort of talisman, as a reassurance from what he considered the highest -court of culture, that he really was one of the elect. - -Yes, that naïve passion for the limelight, for "walking with kings" and -hobnobbing with job lots of celebrities, that "revelling," as Mr. Paine -calls it, "in the universal tribute"--what was its root if not a deep -sense of insecurity, a desire for approval both in his own eyes and in -the eyes of all the world? During those later years in New York, when he -had become so much the professional celebrity, he always timed his -Sunday morning walks on Fifth Avenue for about the hour when the -churches were out. Mr. Paine tells how, on the first Sunday morning, he -thoughtlessly suggested that they should turn away at Fifty-ninth Street -in order to avoid the throng and that Clemens quietly remarked, "I like -the throng." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the Plaza Hotel until -the appointed hour.... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid -the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on -which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was -lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the -multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as -the tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for approval and -corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a -quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted -his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"? -Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obsession: kings, -empresses, princes, archduchesses--what a part they play in his -biography! He is always dragging them in, into his stories, into his -letters, writing about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them, -and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals they have. And as -with kings, so also with great men, or men who were considered great, or -men who were merely notorious. He makes lists of those he has known, -those he has spent evenings with--Mark Twain, to whom celebrity was the -cheapest thing going! Is there not in all this the suggestion of an -almost conscious weakness clutching at strength, the suggestion of some -kind of failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of success? - -Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this same desire for -approval, for corroboration. Mark Twain was supported by the sentiment -of the majority, which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he had -the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the arbiter of all the -elegances; he had virtually the freedom of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and -not only its freedom but a higher rate of payment than any other -_Atlantic_ contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more -reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as -good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells -in 1887, "but I've always done what I could to secure and enlarge my -good opinion of it. I've always said to, myself, 'Everybody reads it and -that's something--it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable -people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by -implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and -fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, -high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody -likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a -note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the -sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, -beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He -rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an -uplifter of the masses; then, with a touch of mock-noble indignation, he -confesses to being a popular entertainer, fully convinced at least that -there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed -to put upon his book an explanatory line: "This is written for the -Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the Members." No plea more -grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great -reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant -of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a -separation between the "Head" and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, -had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for -the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it. - -Mark Twain, in short, knew very well--for I think these illustrations -prove it--that there was something decidedly different between himself -and a great writer. In that undifferentiated mob of celebrities, great, -and less great, and far from great, amid which he moved for a -generation, he was a favored equal. But in the intimate presence of some -isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the -candidate for the mystagogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow -writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude. Was it Browning? -He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied -for a time with the naïve self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen? -Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin note-books: "Been taken -for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was -found the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses the word -"literature" in connection with his own work it is with a sudden -self-consciousness that lets one into the secret of his inner humility. -"I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever -been given a degree by any college in any age of the world, so far as I -know," he writes to the authorities of Yale in 1888. A man who freely -compared himself with the melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, -who, in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins," invited his readers, -who already knew how "the born and trained novelist works," to see how -the "jack-leg" does it, could never have been accused of not knowing his -true rank. "You and I are but sewing-machines," he says in "What Is -Man?" "We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care -nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out -Gobelins." - -I think we are in a position now to understand that boundless comic -impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic impudence which led him to propose -to Edwin Booth in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him to -telegraph to W.T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to -disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now"; which -led him, at the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum, "Why am -I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was -just asking for information." Tempting Providence, was he not, this -child of good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the fates. If -he had not had a certain sense of colossal force, it would never have -occurred to him, however humorously, to place himself on an equality -with Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the Czar and his -magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean. But, on the other hand, it -would never have occurred to him to make these comparisons if he had -felt himself in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are not -only great in energy but masters of themselves let their work speak for -them; men who are not masters of themselves, whose energy, however -great, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are -driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration -from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured -that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare -and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great -fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet -they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure -themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, -therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually -was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which -had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy -that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply -of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable -abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined -with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the -barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of -that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes -one's sole criterion the magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, -ever more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life Mark Twain -was attended by what Mr. Paine calls "psychic evidences"; he never fails -to note the marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is -always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"--he -invented the phrase; strange phenomena of nature rise up in his path. -Three times, while crossing the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each -time he takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the barbarian -conquerors of antiquity, I say, those essential opposites of the -creative spirit, whose control is altogether internal, and who feels -himself the master of his own fate, could have been more in character -than was Mark Twain when he observed, a few months before his death: "I -came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I -expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my -life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no -doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable; freaks, they came in -together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." - -A comet, this time! And a few pages back we found him comparing himself -with a sewing-machine. Which is he, one, or the other, or both? He seems -to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of -extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty -solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, -confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed -to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains. A great -genius, in short, that has never attained the inner control which makes -genius great, a mind that has not found itself, a mind that does not -know itself, a spirit that cloaks to the end in the fantasy of its -temporal power the tragic reality of its own essential miscarriage! - -We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret of Mark Twain's -mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy of that little book which he -called his "Bible," "What Is Man?" He was extremely proud of the -structure of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a machine, -"moved, directed, commanded by _exterior_ influences, _solely_," that he -is "a chameleon, who takes the color of his place of resort," that he is -"a mere coffee-mill," which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee -nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of proprietary interest and -pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he -says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving -impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--and is merely a machine and -entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly -possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in -patching and painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession -and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging -fact approaches." You see how it pleases him, how much it means to him, -that final "Truth," how he clings to it with a sort of defiant insolence -against the "imploring argument," the "damaging fact"? "Man originates -nothing," he says, "not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. -He was a machine, and machines do not create." Faith never gave the -believer more comfort than this philosophy gave Mark Twain. - -But is it possible for a creative mind to find "contentment" in denying -the possibility of creation? And why should any one find pride and -satisfaction in the belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the -denial of "free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and the sour -grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and tragic souls who find -comfort in saying that love exists nowhere in the world because they -themselves have missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark -Twain any pleasure to feel that he was "entitled to no personal merit" -for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he -felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of -feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to -achieve--namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, -"Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the -world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the -creative life is the very embodiment of it--the emergence, that is to -say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant, integrating -principle that turns the world he confronts into a mere instrument for -the registration of his own preferences. There is but one -interpretation, consequently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight -in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine: it brought him -comfort to feel that if he was, as he said, a "sewing-machine," it was -the doing of destiny, and that nothing he could have done himself would -have enabled him to "turn out Gobelins." - -From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that Mark Twain was a -frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development, and beyond this -fact, as we know from innumerable instances the psychologists have -placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of -his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even been -turned, as we shall see; against himself; the poet, the artist in him, -consequently, had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a -spiritual valetudinarian. - -But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to glance not only -at Mark Twain's life and work, but also at the epoch and the society in -which he lived. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - - "One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is - dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, - but they are essentially not happy," - - STENDHAL: _On Love in the United States_. - - -In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, -revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather -material for his book, "Life on the Mississippi." It was, naturally, a -profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what -his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an -assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot -of the steamer _Gold Dust_ recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the -pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We -got to be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most of my -time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a -big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of -the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her -most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me -there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been -no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a -pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." - -Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant, that Mark Twain -recorded in these words, a regret for the passing of time and the charm -and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his -"literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not altogether flattering -to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to -ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely "happy and -care-free" a man of Mark Twain's energy and power could hardly, in later -life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he certainly did: all his -days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a -lost paradise. "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done -in my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am a person," he -wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, "who would quit authorizing in a minute to -go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we -see; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, -that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only -by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact -that the earlier pages of "Life on the Mississippi," in which he -pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and -expressive that he ever wrote. - -It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong hankering for the -lost paradise of the pilot-house. It was something more organic, and -Mark Twain provides us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my -subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his book, "it is no -surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have -followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it." A singular -statement for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life, the -two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are nothing else than love -and pride! But Mark Twain writes those words with an almost unctuous -gravity of conviction, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a -pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had -not experienced it in literature. Strange as that may seem, we cannot -question it; we have, simply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi -pilot had, in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist in -him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in him had never been -satisfied again. We do not have to look beyond this in order to -interpret, if not the fact, at least the obsession. He felt that, in -some way, he had been as a pilot on the right track; and he felt that he -had lost this track. If he was always harking back to that moment, then, -it was, we can hardly escape feeling, with a vague hope of finding again -some scent that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious thread -of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it possible that he had, in -fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that -career? It is a bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark -Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to see first what sort -of boy he was, and what sort of society it was he grew up in; then we -shall be able to understand what unique opportunities for personal -growth the career of a pilot afforded him. - -What a social setting it was, that little world into which Mark Twain -was born! It was drab, it was tragic. In "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom -Sawyer" we see it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a -later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled in Hannibal, on -the Mississippi. He was five at the time; his eyes had opened on such a -scene as we find in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary, -discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he -says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, -desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, -wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in -some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"--it is the epic not only -of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. -How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the -scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E.H. Howe's "Story -of a Country Town," for instance, that Western counterpart in sodden -misery of "Ethan Frome"--a book which has only begun to find its public. -This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest, tells us in so -many words that in all his early days he never saw a woman who was not -anæmic and fretful, a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who -was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment. No wonder he has -come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is -no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain -himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, -dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and -foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, -some gigantic garbage-can! Human nature was not responsible for this -debris of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could human nature -rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and murder," we are told, were the -diversions of the capital city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. -It was not very different in normal times along the Mississippi. -Hannibal was a small place; yet Mr. Paine records four separate murders -which Mark Twain actually witnessed as a boy: every week he would see -some drunken ruffian run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, -he saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many gruesome -experiences," exclaims Mr. Paine, "there appear to have been in those -early days!" But let us be moderate: every one was not violent. As for -the majority of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that history -calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion, justice will never be -realistic. The gods of Greece would have gone unwashed and turned gray -at forty and lost their digestion and neglected their children if they -had been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into an irritable -silence. - -A desert of human sand!--the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, -for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions -after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his -letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a -dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities -may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of -existence inevitably droop and wither." - -Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his -mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of -Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with -John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain -"did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are -told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he -seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a -perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of -his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon -him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking -"sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. -Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent -medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals--we have it from "Tom -Sawyer"--"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were -all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, -desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, -without enough power, grating on their own metal. - -Little Sam, as every one called him, was the fifth child in this -household, "a puny baby with a wavering promise of life"; it is -suggested that he was not wanted. Mr. Paine speaks of him somewhere as -"high-strung and neurotic." We are not surprised, therefore, to find him -at three and four "a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies -that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a -series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as -he lay rolling in the grass." This is the child who is to retain through -life that exquisite sensibility of which so many observers have spoken. -"Once when I met him in the country," says Mr. Howells, for example, of -his later life, "he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in -bringing down a blackbird; and he described the poor, stricken, glossy -thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as -he might have given a wounded child." Already, in his infancy, his -gentle, winning manner and smile make him every one's favorite. A very -special little flower of life, you see, capable of such feeling that at -twenty-three his hair is to turn gray in the tragic experience of his -brother's death. A flower of life, a wild flower, and infinitely -fragile: the doctor is always being called in his behalf. Before he -grows up he is to have prophetic dreams, but now another neurotic -symptom manifests itself. In times of family crisis, at four, when one -of his sisters is dying, at twelve, after the death of his father, he -walks in his sleep: often the rest of the household get up in the middle -of the night to find this delicate little waif with his eyes shut -"fretting with cold in some dark corner." - -Can we not already see in this child the born, predestined artist? And -what sort of nurture will his imagination have? He is abandoned to the -fervid influences of the negro slaves,--for his father had moments of a -relative prosperity. Crouching in their cabins, he drinks in wild, weird -tales of blood-curdling African witchcraft. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, -"an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination -of a delicate child." One thinks indeed of an image that would have -pleased Heine, the image of a frail snow-plant of the North quivering, -flaming in the furnace of the jungle. Mark Twain appears to have been -from the outset a center of interest, radiating a singular potency; and -the more his spirit was subjected to such a fearful stimulus the more -urgently he required for his normal development the calm, clairvoyant -guidance a pioneer child could never have had. The negroes were "in real -charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment." What other -influence was there to counter-balance this? - -One, and one only, an influence tragic in its ultimate consequences, the -influence of Mark Twain's mother. That poor, taciturn, sunstruck -failure, John Clemens, was a mere pathetic shadow beside the woman whose -portrait Mark Twain has drawn for us in the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer." -She who was regarded as a "character" by all the town, who was said to -have been "the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best -dancer, in all Kentucky," who was still able to dance at 80, and lived -to be 87, who belonged, in short, to "the long-lived, energetic side of -the house," directed her children, we are told--and we can believe -it--"with considerable firmness." And what was the inevitable -relationship between her and this little boy? "She had a weakness," says -Mr. Paine, "for the child that demanded most of her mother's care.... -All were tractable and growing in grace but little Sam ... a delicate -little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed." In -later life, "you gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she told -him. In fact, she was always scolding him, comforting him, forgiving -him, punishing and pleading with him, fixing her attention upon him, -exercising her emotions about him, impressing it upon his mind for all -time, as we shall come to see that woman is the inevitable seat of -authority and the fount of wisdom. - -We know that such excessive influences are apt to deflect the growth of -any spirit. Men are like planets in this, that for them to sail clear in -their own orbits the forces of gravity have to be disposed with a -certain balance on all sides: how often, when the father counts for -nothing, a child becomes the satellite of its mother, especially when -that mother's love has not found its normal expression in her own youth! -We have seen that Mark Twain's mother did not love her husband; that her -capacity for love, however, was very great is proved by the singular -story revealed in one of Mark Twain's letters: more than sixty years -after she had quarreled with that young Lexington doctor, and when her -husband had long been dead, she, a woman of eighty or more, took a -railway journey to a distant city where there was an Old Settlers' -convention because among the names of those who were to attend it she -had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. "Who could have imagined -such a heart-break as that?" said Mr. Howells, when he heard the story. -"Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no -more noise than a grave under foot." It made no noise, but it -undoubtedly had a prodigious effect upon Mark Twain's life. When an -affection as intense as that is balked in its direct path and repressed -it usually, as we know, finds an indirect outlet; and it is plain that -the woman as well as the mother expressed itself in the passionate -attachment of Jane Clemens to her son. We shall note many consequences -of this fact as we go on with our story. We can say at least at this -point that Mark Twain was, quite definitely, in his mother's -leading-strings. - -What was the inevitable result? I have said, not, I hope, with too much -presumption, that Mark Twain had already shown himself the born, -predestined artist, that his whole nature manifested what is called a -tendency toward the creative life. For that tendency to become -conscious, to become purposive, two things were necessary: it must be -able, in the first place, to assert itself and in the second place to -embody itself in a vocation; to realize itself and then to educate -itself, to realize itself in educating itself. And, as we know, the -influences of early childhood are, in these matters, vitally important. -If Jane Clemens had been a woman of wide experience and independent -mind, in proportion to the strength of her character, Mark Twain's -career might have been wholly different. Had she been catholic in her -sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no matter how more than -maternal her attachment to her son was, she might have placed before him -and encouraged him to pursue interests and activities amid which he -could eventually have recovered his balance, reduced the filial bond to -its normal measure and stood on his own feet. But that is to wish for a -type of woman our old pioneer society could never have produced. We are -told that the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer" is a speaking portrait of Jane -Clemens, and Aunt Polly, as we know, was the symbol of all the taboos. -The stronger her will was, the more comprehensive were her repressions, -the more certainly she became the inflexible guardian of tradition in a -social régime where tradition was inalterably opposed to every sort of -personal deviation from the accepted type. "In their remoteness from -'the political centers of the young Republic," says Mr. Howells, in "The -Leatherwood God," of these old Middle Western settlements, "they seldom -spoke of the civic; questions stirring the towns of the East; the -commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were; -unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest." And in the slave -States it was not the abolitionist alone whose name was held, as Mr. -Paine says, "in horror," but every one who had the audacity to think -differently from his neighbors. Jane Clemens, in short, was the -embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism which had proved -so favorable to the life of enterprising action but which perceived the -scent of the devil in any least expression of what is now known as the -creative impulse. She had a kind heart, she was always repenting and -softening and forgiving; it is said that whenever she had to drown -kittens, she warmed the water first. But this, without opening any -channel in a contrary direction, only sealed her authority! She won her -points as much by kindness as by law. Besides, tradition spoke first in -her mind; her hand was quicker than her heart; in action she was the -madonna of the hairbrush. And what, specifically, was it that she -punished? Those furtive dealings of Huck and Tom with whitewash and -piracy were nothing in the world--and that is why all the world loves -them--but the first stirrings of the normal æsthetic sense, the first -stirrings of individuality. - -Already I think we divine what was bound to happen in the soul of Mark -Twain. The story of "Huckleberry Finn" turns, as we remember, upon a -conflict: "the author," says Mr. Paine, "makes Huck's struggle a -psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and -sympathy on the other." In the famous episode of Nigger Jim, "sympathy," -the cause of individual freedom, wins. Years later, in "The Mysterious -Stranger," Mark Twain presented the parallel situation we noted in the -last chapter: "we found," says the boy who tells that story, "that we -were not manly enough, nor brave enough to do a generous action when -there was a chance that it could get us into trouble." Conscience and -the law, we see, had long since prevailed in the spirit of Mark Twain, -but what is the conscience of a boy who checks a humane impulse but "boy -terror," as Mr. Paine calls it, an instinctive fear of custom, of tribal -authority? The conflict in "Huckleberry Finn" is simply the conflict of -Mark Twain's own childhood. He solved it successfully, he fulfilled his -desire, in the book, as an author can. In actual life he did not solve -it at all; he surrendered. - -Turn to the record in Mr. Paine's biography. We find Mark Twain in -perpetual revolt against all those institutions for which his mother -stood. "Church ain't worth shucks," says Tom Sawyer. As for school, "he -never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and -remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything -resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of -liberty." One recalls what Huck said of Aunt Polly just before he made -his escape to the woods: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she - won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air get through 'em somehow, and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - -But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally or in any other -way. He never even imagined that his feelings of revolt had any -justification. We remember how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some -escapade, they would resolve to "lead a better life" to go to church, -visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and subsist wholly upon -tracts. That was what Mark Twain did: "not to do so," says, Mr. Paine, -"was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were -heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that." -And his mother was so strong, so courageous, the only strong and -courageous influence he knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he -set them down"--the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and -beaten and sold--"as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a -taste for a better life." Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence -himself, not to play with freedom! "He felt that it was his own -conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's -idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions." Naturally! And -she "punished him and pleaded with him, alternately"--with one -inevitable result. "'To fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote -to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly described that old feeling which -I used to have"; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a -preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be -damned." Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and -preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had -become in his eyes the "bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to -mention the creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"? - -Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and -flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. -Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other -traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities--how can we compare -the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, -horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell -of his infancy and find a vocation there? Calvinism itself had gone to -seed: it was nothing but the dead hand of custom; the flaming priest had -long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he -could find nowhere, either in men or in books, the bread and wine of the -spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, -Frank Burrough, who had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is -record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named -Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincinnati. "They were long fermenting -discourses," Mr. Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to -that winter in Macfarlane's room." And what was the counsel which, from -that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received?--that "man's -heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only -animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness" and that his -intellect was only a "depraving addition to him which, in the end, -placed him in a rank far below the other beasts." Propitious words for -this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with -books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is a memorable picture of the -library in the typical gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to -New Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering," "Affection's -Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa," "Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's -Book," "piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an -inherited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the cultural -background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh -stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the -foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark -Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, -which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half -a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. -"It gave him his cue," says Mr. Paine, "the first word of a part in the -human drama," and he conceived a sudden interest in history and -languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the -least protection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of -fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke. - -In all his environment, then, we see, there was nothing to assist in the -transformation of an unconscious artistic instinct, however urgent, into -a conscious artistic purpose. "Dahomey," wrote Mark Twain once, "could -not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. -Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not -itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of -stimulating exterior circumstances." He was reciting his own story in -those words. But the circumstances that surrounded Mark Twain were not -merely passively unfavorable to his own self-discovery; they were -actively, overwhelmingly unfavorable. He was in his mother's -leading-strings, and in his mother's eyes any sort of personal -self-assertion in choices, preferences, impulses was, literally, sinful. -Thus the whole weight of the Calvinistic tradition was concentrated -against him at his most vulnerable point. His mother, whom he could not -gainsay, was unconsciously but inflexibly set against his genius; and -destiny, which always fights on the side of the heaviest artillery, -delivered, in his twelfth year, a stroke that sealed her victory. - -Mark Twain's father died. Let Mr. Paine picture the scene: - -"The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with -him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, -indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred -things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the -knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother -took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. 'It -is all right, Sammy,' she said. 'What's done is done, and it does not -matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to -promise me----.' He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung -himself into her arms. 'I will promise anything,' he sobbed, 'if you -won't make me go to school! Anything!' His mother held him for a moment, -thinking, then she said: 'No, Sammy, you need not go to school any more. -Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.' So -he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like -his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and -justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious -matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held -sacred. That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to -somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping -together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous -at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, -they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid -on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A -thought struck Mrs. Clemens: 'Sam!' she said. He answered, but he was -sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet -around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in -succession after that. Then he slept more soundly." - -Who is sufficiently the master of signs and portents to read this -terrible episode aright? One thing, however, we feel with irresistible -certitude, that Mark Twain's fate was once for all decided there. That -hour by his father's corpse, that solemn oath, that walking in his -sleep--we must hazard some interpretation of it all, and I think we are -justified in hazarding as most likely that which explains the most -numerous and the most significant phenomena of his later life. - -To a hypersensitive child such as Mark Twain was at eleven that -ceremonious confrontation with his father's corpse must, in the first -place, have brought a profound nervous shock. Already, we are told, he -was "broken down" by his father's death; remorse had "laid a heavy hand -on him." But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? -"A hundred things in themselves trifling," which had offended, in -reality, not his father's heart but his father's will as a conventional -citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. -Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings out of this moody child, the -first wavering steps of the soul, that is what they have really been, -these peccadillos, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings -of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed; all those -crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, -are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of -that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, -with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meager traditions. -He is to go forth the Good Boy by _force majeure_, he is to become such -a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his -father's failure, to recover the lost gentility of a family that had -once been proud, to realize that "mirage of wealth" that had ever hung -before his father's eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly -with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to -remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and -all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any -fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away -childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always -a child, your mother's child! In a day to come you will write to one of -your friends, "We have no _real_ morals, but only artificial -ones--morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural -and healthy instincts." Never mind that now; your mother imagines her -heart is in the balance--will you break it?... Will you promise?... And -the little boy, in the terror of that presence, sobs: "Anything!" - -"There is in every man," said Sainte-Beuve, "a poet who dies young." In -truth, the poet does not die; he falls into a fitful trance. It is -perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment: he became, -and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism is the proof of it, a -dual personality. If I were sufficiently hardy, as I am not, I should -say that that little sleep-walker who appeared at Jane Clemens's bedside -on the night of her husband's funeral was the spirit of Tom Sawyer, come -to demand again the possession of his own soul, to revoke that ruthless -promise he had given. He came for several nights, and then, we are told, -the little boy slept more soundly, a sign, one might say, if one were a -fortune-teller, that he had grown accustomed to the new and difficult -rôle of being two people at once! The subject of dual personality was -always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to -his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, -susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown -from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation -of consciousness. His "wish" to be an artist, which has been so frowned -upon and has encountered such an insurmountable obstacle in the -disapproval of his mother, is now repressed, more or less definitely, -and another wish, that of winning approval, which inclines him to -conform with public opinion, has supplanted it. The individual, in -short, has given way to the type. The struggle between these two selves, -these two tendencies, these two wishes or groups of wishes, will -continue throughout Mark Twain's life, and the poet, the artist, the -individual, will make a brave effort to survive. From the death of his -father onward, however, his will is definitely enlisted on the side -opposed to his essential instinct. - -When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on his first excursion -into the great world, he gladly takes the oath, which his mother -administers, "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is -away, an oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do what -seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has -become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey -of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. -Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record -shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was -twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East -as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter journey lasted -more than a year; one might have expected it to open before him an -immense horizon; yet he seems, to judge from his published letters to -have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts or feelings of -youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of aspiration, of hope, depression, -joy, even ambition! His letters are as full of statistics as the -travel-reports of an engineer, and the only sensation he seems to -experience is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no wish -to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He is, in fact, under a -spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits himself, even from seeking on his -own account that vital experience which is the stuff of the creative -life. - -Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He hears "the old call of -the river." He becomes a pilot. - -Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon -this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the -world was to know later--"dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to -details"--should ever have persisted in acquiring the "absolutely -limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that -Mark Twain "loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and -not only the river, but a steamboat; and still more, perhaps, the -freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine omits one -important particular. We have seen that in Mark Twain two opposed groups -of wishes--the wish to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's -approval, to stand in with pioneer society--were struggling for -survival. When we turn to his account of the Mississippi pilots, their -life, their activities, their social position, we can see that in this -career both these wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in -the first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative occupation; -besides this, of all the pioneer types of the Mississippi region, the -pilot alone embodied in any large measure the characteristics of the -artist: in him alone these characteristics were permitted, in him they -were actually encouraged, to survive. - -We cannot understand why this was so without bearing in mind a -peculiarity of the pioneer régime upon which we shall have occasion more -than once to dwell. Mr. Herbert Croly has described it in "The Promise -of American Life." "In such a society," says Mr. Croly, "a man who -persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting -standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His -finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than -did the current careless and hasty product and his higher standards and -peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of -his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which -naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and -uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that -the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a -special vocation and high standards of achievement. Such a man did -insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under -the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value. -Consequently, they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with -special vocations." - -Here, of course, we have what is by far the most important fact to be -considered in any study of the creative life in the West; as we shall -see, Mark Twain remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own -view of the "special vocation" of literature. What is to be noted now is -that the pilot was an exception, and the only exception in the -Mississippi region, to this general social law. In Nevada, in -California, where Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin -his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system described by Mr. -Croly reigned in its most extreme and uncompromising form; every one had -to be a jack-of-all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The -entire welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the -Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before the war, upon -the expert skill of the pilot; for the river traffic to be secure at -all, he alone, but he at least, had to be a craftsman, a specialist of -the very highest order. There were no signal-lights along the shore, we -are told; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars; the pilot -had to know every bank and dead tree and reef, every cut-off and -current, every depth of water, by day and by night, in the whole stretch -of twelve hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he had to -"smell danger in the dark and read the surface of the water as an open -page." Upon his mastery of that "supreme science," as it was called, -hung all the civilization of the river folk, their trade, their -intercourse with the great centers, everything that stirred them out of -the inevitable stagnation of an isolated village existence. The pilot -was, consequently, in every sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a -"sovereign." Not only did he receive commands from nobody but he was -authorized to resent even the merest suggestion. "I have seen a boy of -eighteen," Mark Twain tells us, "taking a great steamer serenely into -what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing -mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere." Pilots -were, he says, "treated with marked deference by all, officers and -servants and passengers," and he adds naïvely: "I think pilots were -about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, -embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes." Above all, -and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of -experience in American society, recurs with most significant emphasis, -the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that -highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole -condition without which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. -"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the -only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the -earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people -... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... writers of all kinds are -manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but -then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and -child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day -I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." - -Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a -sort of channel for all the æsthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? -"When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent -ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a -steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were -only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and -material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: -repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for -a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can -hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, -to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating -enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean--first rate, for once! not -second, or third, or fourth--light and bright and gay, radiating a sort -of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, -its trim vigor. And what an air they had of _going_ somewhere, of -_getting_ somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit -of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! -Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of -mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And -the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any -menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and -their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the -fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great -master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that -of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural -passion of the novice lavished, for love of the _métier_, upon the only -creative--shall I say?--at least the only purposive figure in all his -experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the -Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It -was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. -"You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. -I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, -kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what -couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric -magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the -visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the -United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is -unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure æsthetic emotion, produced by a -supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship. - -Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said -in later life, when he used to assert so passionately that man is a mere -chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of -his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and -dictatorship of Circumstance.... Then Circumstance arrived with another -turning-point of my life--a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of -a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became -a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and -out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many -other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other assertion that to -be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts -had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and -respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct -to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited -an enthusiastic interest in craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a -neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;" -"he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required -intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those -printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, -therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the -training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark -Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted -to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to -submit to at any later period of his life. - -In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful -compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his -apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his -apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five -hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his -tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, -unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, -how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": -"even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," -says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament -could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is -to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a -career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, -initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum -all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, -"and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, -if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and -worship it! I want a man to--I want _you_ to--take up a line of action, -and _follow_ it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain -who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man -in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the -book, "I guess this is where our line starts"? - -Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that -shiftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for -dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of -his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, -if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, -meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of -existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing -with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to -have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I -used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things -got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can -trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and -another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, -who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing -down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. -Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the -life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to -study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. -Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books -and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots," -says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, -travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an -education as well as an entertainment to know." - -Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life" -is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was--as -it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you -were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the -world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside -from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and -straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of -some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates -what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle -or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, -application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, -determined spirit." - -It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile sentiment: it is -the emotion of a man who feels himself in the center of the road of his -own destiny. - - - - -CHAPTER III - -THE GILDED AGE - - - "The American democracy follows its ascending march, - uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as - the decrees of eternity." - - GEORGE BANCROFT. - - -You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, -feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim -labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an -artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent -nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp -schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted -with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in -fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in -fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, -for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river." - -Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him -for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as -the streets of London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia -served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will -it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great -writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound -personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the -mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread -in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind -with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits -of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, -he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has -his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circumstance -steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost. - -The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever -to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's -career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative -education, came to an abrupt end. - -Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change -instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to -him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that -exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in -the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that -he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a -military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The -whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with -which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it -does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility, -in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of -twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river -"sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and -purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that -amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and -there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on -the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had -thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and -'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark -Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the -characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile -frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over -his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was -fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a -little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become -organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would -never, in later years, have been led to assert so passionately that man -is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of -self-determination, was so new to this man who had passed his whole -adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent, -chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, -that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back -into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the -one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four -years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship: nothing -stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation. - -A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing -himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the -Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of -the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and -follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book -eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with -a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in -his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and -after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and -scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a -contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have -struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; -that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who -could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution -his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly -yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he -is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the -compulsions of his childhood. - - * * * * * - -But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall -have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about -[the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was -Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance -now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of -his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself. - -What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the -midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties -and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the -beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an -indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the -war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, -as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when -presidents were business men and generals were business men and -preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the -American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of -the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was -virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career -of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was -certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested -public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. -Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he -was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his -Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole -field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I -fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest -field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, -by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his -epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can -see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, -science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I -would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to -have accumulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was -offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into -the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to -burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the -John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than -be Historian or General or President." - -Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have -offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that -of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one -channel passed all the religious fervor of the race. - -I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, -artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works -often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a -story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called -the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love -with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to -make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes -West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and -again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had -made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the -tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would -strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it -then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to -him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was -all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he -persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or -four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I -_must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip -fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am -conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I -will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with -fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when -the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! -"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of -consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were -all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a -golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid -wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and -the Gilded Age is justified in its children. - -Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our -civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the -stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national -epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of -money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious -character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify -that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure -in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of -discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" -consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long -for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence -to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for -it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of -"another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the -mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious -zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in -the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor -of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are -repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has -become the prophet. - -We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to -Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit -of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration -of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and -Letters of John Hay": - - That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on - your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a - judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your - improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not - be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This - summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not - pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The - property you own--be it a tiny cottage or a palace--means so - much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up - whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an - attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization. - -Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances -that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are -the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not -by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in -material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up" -with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, -of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and -most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that -can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the -history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, -and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of -letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the -will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he -was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers -and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the -imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, -therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence -upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own -normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal -culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: -"Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor -and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with -occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the -bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here -one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality -of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything -was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in -his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very -disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be -acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and -notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be -tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he -not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, -and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, -debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what -is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, -for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the -other stars. - -We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we -realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War -were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought -were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, -in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity -of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the -West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success, -that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit -of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have -survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they -would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it -they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they -encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of -adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was -not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the -possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay -before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and -the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up -some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great -rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a -race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through -private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the -group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American -nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation -to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady -welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also -serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests -were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult. - -It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute homogeneity of -feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous folk before the Civil War and the -practical effect of pioneering and the business régime was to keep us -so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the -homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated -it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The -effect of business upon the individual has never been better described -than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I have known, and known -tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men--'big' financially--men -famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do -not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to -meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them -associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A -set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially -unattractive and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has -explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is -as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a -system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his -individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is -determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby -usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or -any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men -are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have -a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities -are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value -of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such -is the result of the business process, and the success of the process -required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually -automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality -significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has -drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the -collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the -collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than -the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere -assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is -called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality, -the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical, -realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly -says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the -man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact, -one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs -and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd. - -For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that -were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to -romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in -feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out -their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the -hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as -one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the -pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed? -Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform -dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an -anæsthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, -without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their -enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for -themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One -recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual -motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its -inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that -buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him -wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated -with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction -between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of -the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the -Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and -half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy -clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a -feudal castle, his wife is a châteleine, his children the baron's cubs, -and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the -broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable -blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the -promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of -his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him -the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the -material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason -and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of -reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these -illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the -story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim -Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to -whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends -used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green -plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums, -"California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one -eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had -to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting, -aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding -sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, -boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the -others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided -him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, -and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the -luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the -romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same -over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names -as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that -made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious -pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to -"boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain -parts of the West. - -Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would -not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the -country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of -criticism, in fact, was regarded as _lèse-majesté_ to the folk-spirit of -America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell -the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and -reputation. Who does not remember the story of Dickens's connection -with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil -Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less -attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an -agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and -defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded -as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no -intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong -emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad -and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was -regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was -obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of -actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, -becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant -than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge -Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' -Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll," -says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in -society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, -and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own -notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short, -entitled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary, -that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves -superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If -you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of -your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and -warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent. - -As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America -against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in -England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating -forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse -of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic -prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and -humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name -of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic -industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of -the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins -and the Morrises--in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly -untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar -destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the -state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of -1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While -the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined -place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and -fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, -and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed -that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism -they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were -the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to -victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant." - -Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, -even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the -individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the -human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil -War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or -less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the -rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, -had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were -stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a -natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, -had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories. - -In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the -gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those -days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand _young_ -men--not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, -muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and -royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and -magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious -ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans--none but -erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was -a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths -stayed at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers." -Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature -itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and -calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of -the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order -to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening -space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not -to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the -future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who -were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the -towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of -story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the -life of this New England countryside during the generation that -followed--those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants -of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population -only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What -a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!--a -civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death. -Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation -as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those -manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the -generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole -spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a -neurotic anæmia in which it has remained so largely to this day. - -This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of -its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the -unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the -fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. -Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper -in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it -was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them -high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they -were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure -shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, -just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's -unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the -winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an -extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the -less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had -gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had -not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed -them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like -Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in -Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the -stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American -past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the -conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was -not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright -light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left -behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men -westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and -the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her -complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had -become the pacemaker in the arts. - -One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new -régime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England -that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to -carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien -editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, was consecrated to the high priesthood -by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, -already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly -appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a -young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he -resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life--an -incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his -prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own -unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America -anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. -His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an -essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his -superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed -him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative -reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all -masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured -point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate -any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his -position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what -Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, -from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and -submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and -formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide -the notion of the artist's rôle through which he had found his own -salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the -religious, moral and social taboos of the time. - -I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy -actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now -that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply -played into the hands of the business régime? The taboos of the one -supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of -both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring -as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, -disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the -fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled -Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who -possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what -necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that -drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during -the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against -the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, -that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry -Adams his novel, "Democracy." - -With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these -men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, -motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding -type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong -assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon -which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of -literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist -and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who -are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and -disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American -minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of -William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad -crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate -minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of -glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing -materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see -from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, -these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by -theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers -who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age -that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop -to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form. - -Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: -no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; -there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, -for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing -eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping -with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes -that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything -essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, -admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he -mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a -belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism -of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural -possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely -upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does -not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of -life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his -eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism -of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic -dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play -in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of -decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, -of inarticulate misery--read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of -the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other -nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or -next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would -have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch -without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing -upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna -of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, -moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain -hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had -forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the -welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's -"manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of -pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the -disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a -certain beautiful residuum of truth. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -IN THE CRUCIBLE - - - "The American proposes to realize his individuality freely - and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and - free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly - consenting that some other person, better qualified or more - competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when - he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to - will." - - GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: _The People of Action_. - - -Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the -gold-fields of Nevada--the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one -that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded -Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the -woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about -a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good -time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a -child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him -out for destruction. - -Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confrères of -the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of -history, travels, literature and the sciences--a young man whom it was -an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says -Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, -indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as -one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a -certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from -the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of -barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and -dandy--in fancy percales and patent leathers--in white duck and striped -shirts--he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch -hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of -the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in -dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further -than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable -surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And -whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his -utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life -as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing -vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't -suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier -frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching -thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half -the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the -indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of -development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him -had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had -been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. -He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment. - -Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true -of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of -previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common -fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the -gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it -was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were -transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion -of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing -It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of -the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there -as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the -'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever -produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves -were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other -vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost -fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes -that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in -every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military -companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, -'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, -civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey -mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and -station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. -The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock -lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North -to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development." - -This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly -opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark -Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he -might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing -spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark -Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, -far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make -terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such -a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make -money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family--that old pledge was -fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his -failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own. -Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was -the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally -enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great -triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered -it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were -gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to -exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing -what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, -more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the -river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his -father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had -become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother -Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of -success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the -position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say, -compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not -fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for -him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine -once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make -good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also -become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his -Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look -upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or -revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man. - -What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself? -A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of -inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the -indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had -obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was -indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was -tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held -absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the -rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who -submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher -standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the -easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." -Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative -instinct, therefore--and he was anything but fully aware of them--he -could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his -craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to -acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of -sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--all -those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct--were, from -the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely -in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken -down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the -tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in -them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his -own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly -organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of -torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe, -which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering -words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks -of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was -always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous -hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it -our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He -was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality -was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a -day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were -incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who -was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated -at first, he always yielded in the end. - -Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive -instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was -stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one -could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one -afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying -'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would -come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he -would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going -after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all -their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around -to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next -forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual -facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself -strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as -twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a -foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest -a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand -in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you -that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had -to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not -merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his -level best to become a millionaire. - -It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain -failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth -a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with -exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he -failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new -work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. -Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment--these were the -qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life -had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of -his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in -spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not -fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He -went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied -me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. -"The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, -"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their -movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and -suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom -humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are -likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the -flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense -anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other -extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up -everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his -comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to -the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to -bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a -critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed -simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to -succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and -yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly -anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark -Twain's business life. - -So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious -desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of -individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in -the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted -him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the -necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American -writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain -solved by becoming a humorist. - -Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's -soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more -than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of -his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he -would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off -"alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely -from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at -all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his -surroundings"--wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would -hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything -else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to -establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the -fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." -"He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner -who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a -camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!--all the -contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's -fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to -succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in -himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives -in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted -to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any -one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up -hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary -paper in Virginia City; hell!" - -Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary -pretensions called the _Enterprise_, which was edited and written by a -group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was -to the _Enterprise_ that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and -at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he -presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with -profound reluctance. - -Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born -writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any -opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a -life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have -gravitated toward such people as the _Enterprise_ group: that he did so -is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But -committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a -different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky -journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the -pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a -good time," says Mr. Paine. "The _Enterprise_, 'Comstock to the -backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain -could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself -with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, -as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" -says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as -a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he -fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when -"the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all -hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding -himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile -walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," -says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he -came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How -different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his -piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked -forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an -inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself -and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a -capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a -hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the _Enterprise_ office worn and -travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard -leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about -one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he -added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It -was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to -claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is -something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that -suggests not an acclamation but a surrender? - -Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the -_Enterprise_ Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He -attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to -me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to -break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the -surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." -No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more -or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on -the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was -relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune -that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were -plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him -reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself -so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to -excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, -and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this -opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must -consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but -the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the -creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but -actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the -_Enterprise_ mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he -had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, -and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of -a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by -the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was -this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens -the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark -Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the _Enterprise_ -was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate -that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, -the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if -he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would -prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any -other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For -him, therefore, the opportunity of the _Enterprise_ meant an obligation -to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he -wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would -not have displayed such reluctance in joining the _Enterprise_, and the -fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a -humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling -his own soul. - -Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come -to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. -But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his -amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading -together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his -triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and -said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself--I am allowing -myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any -longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied -himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to -choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not -only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many -instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a rôle which he -apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate -all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it. - -But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. -Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer -rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the -mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new -title"--the pen-name he had adopted--"and its success." He knew that his -severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, -worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he -was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a -rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that -promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the -mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately -proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his -new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we -actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to -telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That -he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that -he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a -commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: -"His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," -says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not -with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was -necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a -good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the -_nom de plume_ was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, -crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations -in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted -a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his -merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the -time--in pioneer circles, especially, observe--simply argues that all -the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a -form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own -persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting -coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe -water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in -Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought -of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which -he was proud only because it paid. - -It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he -had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone -astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was -intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was -desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the -evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been -here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We -are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find -with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again." -Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is -certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is -crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his -journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No--not -home again--in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The -city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business -anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had -become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had -been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a -loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the -trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New -York as he is about to start on the _Quaker City_ excursion which is to -result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two -letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of -his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he -says: "I am wild with impatience to move--move--_move_!... Curse the -endless delays! They always kill me--they make me neglect every duty and -then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never -had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am -so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish -anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored -full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an -accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless -moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly -unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his -family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the -most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself -to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, -transgressed his principle of growth? - -One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in -New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it -was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in -the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. -Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while -for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a -lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought -disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus -Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it -as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he -believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written -January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what -to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up -and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save -piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be -excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single -out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and -His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to -please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed -that he had not even offered it to _The Californian_, the magazine to -which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard -it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter -prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he -has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other -hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for -it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate -him, this poor, ingenuous being!--this divided soul who has never been -able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows -no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his -own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping -Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone -rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary -edifice." - -So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted -this rôle unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic -self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying -that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative -instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive -instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that -instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by -public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine, -"was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that -never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings -of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been -to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even, -constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler -calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order -to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak -child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal -life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his -companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled -in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular. -United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make -money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it -received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected, -repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb -and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest. - -Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights -of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets. -Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes -of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to -laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered -a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the -mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his -improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect." -He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a -bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The -Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some -degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute -accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the _Quaker City_ he -found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry -Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to -follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second -book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and -intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides -this, it brought him the recognition of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It -brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the -postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a -choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be -disposed to accept--"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a -Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's -appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It -brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, -assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London--mine being -(between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was -received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the -long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least -one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on -any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in -gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when -one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite -actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred -against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." -Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which -he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset -his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in -Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go -home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic -conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient -in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had -made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had -pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in -America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored -regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely -overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most. - -It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James -Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in -their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a -humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing -that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be -something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they -found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant -something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of -culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal -visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but -to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only -ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been -a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent -barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the -presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen -applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a -dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do -it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to -his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being -gulled, and partly because he wasn't--because the beautiful force of -his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, -because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, -are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with -slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was -not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was -being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, -by the people who really _knew_, whose judgment could really be trusted. -Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply -countersigning the verdict of America. - -For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain -men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have -seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation -into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment -when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business -agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about -this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But -the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America -played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over -to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward--these -must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a -diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was -not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything -less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all -their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made. - -It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus -Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada -world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are -told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps -with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too -could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's -counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit -with possibilities of inner growth before him--what could Artemus Ward -have known about such things?--but as an embryonic institution, so to -speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself -and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he -ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was -subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," -said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement -of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and -character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with -inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had -been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we -look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les -Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for -knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can -we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not -withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, -had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not -already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America -capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said -to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least -resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your -mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend--into life -and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and -"extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never -forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he -acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and -refined party" of the _Quaker City_ excursion which led him to the feet -of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward -Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread -and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," -said he--Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now -here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to -deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than -enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do -it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him -how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his -percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in -the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were -the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men -of statecraft, literature and divinity. - -Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance -of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner -peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him -committed to the pursuit of worldly success. - -That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a -creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. -He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral -infantility. We know that the rôle of laugh-maker had, from early -adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in -Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers -laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud -and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, -where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his -audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, -he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in -public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had -returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held -so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That -persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to -a _métier_ in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of -craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It -was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least -resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was -falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied -that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the -artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a -journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance. - -Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he -wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have -doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, -except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." -To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success -of his book--a success the like of which had scarcely been known in -America--Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a -journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and -editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the -rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer -with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that -Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's -fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest -point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had -temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now -again literature had dropped into the background, had become an -avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial -interests!--there were whole years during which he thought of hardly -anything else. - -This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, -with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic -attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to -"follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a -series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage -of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the -same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of -adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was -this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered -by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the -success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other -autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige -machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning -to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary -life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the -boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a -peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other -phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various rôles he has -played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or -education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I -ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that -under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the -reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really -experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all -different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the -artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an -infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he -tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and -again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There -was nothing new in that story"--"The American Claimant"--"but the -finger-prints in this one is virgin ground--absolutely _fresh_, and -mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied -a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded -to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public -wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with -what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"--the -possibilities of this, the possibilities of that--in the commercial, not -in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the -promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with -its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, -in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series -that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not -as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally -conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his -life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot -and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant -of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naïvely, -"but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a -thing as an artist had never existed. - -Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark -Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his -agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, -Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain -hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is -reputation anyway--money is secondary." So he floods the house with -complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he -says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune -didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and -your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the -country." It was true. But in that moment--that typical moment, in that -reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's -die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with -generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to -walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes -to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a -formidable spirit, that _alter ego_ within him,--he is going to hear its -bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: -his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the -dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned -over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished -to secure a government appointment for Orion." - -Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable -sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says--with an emphasis of his -own--he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. -From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called -adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence -without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" -now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments." - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - - - "Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as - bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride." - - IBSEN: _The Comedy of Love_. - - -The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, -consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead -himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and -still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most -consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own -way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy -calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what -Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, -of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so -little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in -America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: -"in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious -things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to -practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon -one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the -bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. -No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of -industry. - -Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he -put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light -are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if -Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the -children of light he would have been perfectly free--to starve and to -shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its -moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he -could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the -recognized American game according to the recognized American rules. - -Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct -of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just -because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks -of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that -people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling -them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the -lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a -personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his -environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear -for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the -most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without -foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. -Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he -wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, -to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left -vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished -him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he -met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make -good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew -the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in -prestige, stood to him _in loco parentis_; and, to complete the ironic -circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a -Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them -he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. -Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody." - -The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later -years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we -are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser -Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit -heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions -that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the -will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus -Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what -they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret -Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently -until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to -a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in -the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above -all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first -moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary -affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature -and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean -Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The -Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the -woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom -with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual -rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by -his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the -self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go -his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always -been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve -it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S. -McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself. - -In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to -the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the -prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a -contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the -community to which money is the primary condition and the primary -instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew -Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged -to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the -spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an -expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a -young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued -now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And -meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social -inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish -manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness--everything that made -foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that -would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to -consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of -a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of -bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had -ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had -become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of -humor was a gold-mine--so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently -cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He -was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he -wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot -properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we -realize that he had been manoeuvered into the rôle of a candidate for -gentility. - -But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had -been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his -creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead -father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his -mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man, -in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take -precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been -the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the -days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he -was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go -back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure -as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained -precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time, -we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever--proud (even if somewhat, -critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had -been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, -scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In -turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the -same Sam, and always would be--a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true -that Mark Twain, _who_ required authority as much as he required -affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who -would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be -mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at -least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and -afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the _Quaker -City_ party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and -character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed -my buttons on," he wrote--he was thirty-two at the time--"kept my -clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), -lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only -natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife -"implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his -subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, -"she edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my -works--she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the -totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia -Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death -Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her. -Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about -him?--"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was, -I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken -the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place. -Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara -Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the -billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."--a sign that was -always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been -called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used -to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him -straight--"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he -went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have -been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue -of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male. - -As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest -that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been -affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other -reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to -adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest -instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of -success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with -the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on -terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old -renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make -good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated -obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just -as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or -finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little -less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying -that, automatically, her gods had become his. - -It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations -between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere -of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even -of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is -regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English -criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, -Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family -and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village -ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At -bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic -analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is -of profound importance to society and because they know that what any -man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and -affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind -that all the best biographies even of our American worthies--Hamilton, -Franklin and Lincoln, for instance--have been written by Englishmen! No -one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society -has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, -therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited -his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, -whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his rôle as a realist and -carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her -heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest -has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and -that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations -and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist -and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of -European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New -Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as -creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. -Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, -she stepped immediately into a rôle far more truly influential than that -of any President. - -Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and -mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in -any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization -all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual -culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted -down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had -attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social -stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, -fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter -generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular -sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, -imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to -submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august -brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains -on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with -their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The -quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect -based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of -the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice -proclaimed them sacrosanct. - -We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a -presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place--a place -of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, -pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the -daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not -to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame -did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted -almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that -Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of -Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he -had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had -been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect -for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt -himself, the interloper then--he would not have been Carlyle but the -stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark -Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl -without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned -anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been -conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her -friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore--and love -compelled him to do that--he had to win the approval and the pride of -Elmira itself, he had to win the _imprimatur_ of all that vast and -intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the -symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," -that "no one was good enough for her--certainly not this adventurous -soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark -Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy -upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in -order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in -California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his -character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the -"worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover -on his mettle? - -Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this -new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able -to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his -candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the -vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and -lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know, -"he had become suddenly a person of substance--an associate of men of -consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He -was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to -that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to -refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But -could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we -are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his -financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book," -he wrote, "unless there was _money_ in it, and a good deal of it"; he -had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and -"conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were -almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent -and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his -marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already--the best possible -omen for one with his resources--$22,000 in debt! He had put his -shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even -faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so -manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being -equal--and his wife would see to that--he really was a safe, -conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon -capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain, -anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to -cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been -accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course -they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and -besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start -them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in -"The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal -that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, -whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all -significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author -adds, naïvely, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated -as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon -in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally -stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that -this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his -gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot -forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable -street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage -and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous _ménage_. -It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's -wedding day!--he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the -confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely -committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the -outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly -shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had -foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, -"lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper -enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the -ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the -ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged -it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound -himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that -Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo _Express._ -Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business -man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one. - -The full consequences of this moral surrender--shall we call it?--can -only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, -precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently -and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he -might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in -his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many -other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven -back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect _horror_ and -heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the -bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I -cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I -suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you -would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have -wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems -to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who -was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His -bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. -"Farewell--a long farewell--to business!" he exclaimed during those -weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will _never_ touch -it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I -will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as -follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good -and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer -up--don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has -been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. _Except_ when I think of -you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving -and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem -to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the -dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but -no dishonor--and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, -Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she -doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't -convince _me_!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary -of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before -all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, -who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her -husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind -in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. -She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and -all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in -the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to -retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very -ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he -was involved more and more deeply in it. - -As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation -as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should -adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that -he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the -matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had -promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was -laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed -his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical -type--at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete -invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to -sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her -back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, -to arise and walk--Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, -and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. -"I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark -Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first -child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal -absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his -wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I -am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am -done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith -to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What -chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the -pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find -his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never -possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new -life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are -valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are -admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that -private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime -interests of man. - -"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is -said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and -the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all -matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. -"Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of -supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for -the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a -little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely -going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had -been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; -but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and -purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his -personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she -set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in -each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward -the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, -indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; -she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of -religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his -religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens -had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... -It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family -prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a -Bible chapter." Thus was reëstablished over him that old Calvinistic -spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a -child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what -fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious -man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, -for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," -says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly -with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with -the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the -proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had -long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she -prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness -to which he, the chivalrous Southerner--the born cavalier, in -reality--could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him -"Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in -keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could -never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only -accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he -gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her -"exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own -judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as -another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would -quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral." - -It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the -blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in -turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive -about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me -do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was -partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, -but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between -the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial -body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in -their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was -also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried -to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having -annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in -order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose -approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of -embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table -that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, -"and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was -almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the -guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells -after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells -bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than -we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last -moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send -her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more -for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for -mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, -after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had -privately suggested to you that we hadn't any _frames,_ and that if you -wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was -simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How _could_ -you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive -nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have -been intolerable to her that, at the _Atlantic_ dinners, her husband, in -spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood -was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as -Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, -unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all -hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his -Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace -does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my -list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I -was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my -repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as -an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not -been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it -tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, -as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods. - -Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character -can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his -marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter -of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of -letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept -him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial -assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo _Express_; in return, -he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his -Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be -immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate -editorship of the Buffalo _Express_ without a single word of comfort or -encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to -be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word -shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom -is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more -innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage -had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of -chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already -induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting -"parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal, -the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could -manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief -censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed -him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture, -meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please -Boston--impossible, terrifying task!--had become as obligatory upon Mark -Twain as to please Elmira. - -We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the -Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider -the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared -to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of -his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston -audience--4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and -he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in -a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a -charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells -was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the -nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the -latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her -husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled -them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter -of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a -court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him--to his -own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to -your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who -takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and -of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject -when Livy took charge of me ... and I may _still_ be to the rest of the -world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no -doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been -enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as -an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own -self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in -behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no -comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were -themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges -of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's -neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It -seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an -old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great -embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder -that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do -about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats -and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In -this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility--provincial because it -was without a sense of proportion--were kept constantly before his mind -and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the -Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad -threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple -Delilah his wife. - -For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a -taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The -criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens -and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they -formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to -read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of -life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could -not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion -of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud, -under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible -and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive -ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, -was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold -novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language -for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at -work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so -greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather -discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all. -"Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs. -Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable -damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other -way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind -fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And -shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by -the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy -says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're -going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly -gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits -and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody -might have written but whose romantic mediævalism was equally -respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs. -Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have -been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." -Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural -genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such -subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if -we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in -these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of -"blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark -Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only -tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly -pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds: -"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He -persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet -acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to -friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so -little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this -mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, -precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to -live down. - -Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the rôle of critic and censor. A -memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over -the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her -task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them: - - Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word - would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty - often. - - But can't I get it in _any_where? You've knocked it out - every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, - good word. - - Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing - a slave boy. - - It's out, and my father is whitewashed. - - Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change - "breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. - I would take that and "offal" out of the language. - - You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. - - - -We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive -as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility -and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, -no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no -artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for -bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his -latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as -something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of -conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, -specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; -and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to -further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially -as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, -as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash -not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. -Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't -afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his -letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the -"swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the -thing Huck would say"--namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark -Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a -certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of -Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it -into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his -conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the -German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. -Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. -Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute -she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her -tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to -miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. -Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my -scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little -one-sided?" - -They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers -behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for -an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. -"Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party--in -Rome--he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one -wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. -Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, -you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, -regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've -been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these -tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an -ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. -Very humiliating, and also very tragic! - -Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western -life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to -win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, -seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant -word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of -liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess -that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" -was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that -grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to -formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, -free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, -he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins -themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And -in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all -the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, -instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the -genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature -and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to -seek. - -Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain -Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty -years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough -in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it -assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he -wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his -little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up -and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one -more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do -anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, -and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one -locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in -1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular -success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he -had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from -pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire--we know it as -much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his -own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious -to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of -corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was -here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid -before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: -'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere -magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself--publish it -first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some -of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There -was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of -the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark -Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe -in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! -The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was -to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great -leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child -who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to -smoke the pipe of truth. - -Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it -shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe -and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man--is it -remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, -happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, -the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game -as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns -an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life -is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, -as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five -on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week -day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss -wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, -on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a -will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from -responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of -creating standards of his own and living up to them? - -"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," -wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which -influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets -him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find -himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose -approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's -command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a -deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views -which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and -blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in -public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like -the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his -environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color--had -he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul? - -"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his -life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had -never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor -express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more -idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any -possibility have occurred to him to _resolve_ to become brave. He _could -not originate the idea_--it had to come to him from the _outside_." - -The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of -Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic -plea in self-extenuation? - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - - - "Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole - capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he - cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping - friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what - one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. - This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ." - - IBSEN: _Letter to Brandes_,1870. - - -And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that -all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, -uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and -passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who -used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. -Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher -of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark -Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and -unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he -has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every -great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous -relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined -to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian -interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the -labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his -individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to -type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer -environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering -in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, -from the outset of his life, subjected itself! - -Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy -as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," -he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition -was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and -uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas -and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an -expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; -trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark -Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a -person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven -to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they -did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, -to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the -husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the -purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and -entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of -his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this -narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so -powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that -instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood. - -We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's -universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he -seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his -fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his -nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. -"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a -heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes -and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and -lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came -home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its -eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from -this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed -neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the -worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one -great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's -home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his -domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any -monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; -it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And -having accepted the rôle of the opulent householder, he threw into it as -much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work. - -Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going -to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses -were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up -to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," -"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, -according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to -increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at -hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for -explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those -who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand -that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, -mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something -almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent -considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of -living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for -some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, -not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel -Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the -visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently -extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was -living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses -amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In -the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could -furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and -highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural -taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, -would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those -early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his -"disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that -finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large -hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, -"he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and -delight of his guests. There were _always_ guests; they were coming and -going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a -'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of -his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay -the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he -virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer -months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his -mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these -things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that -they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed -for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit -cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more -ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the -child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she -found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy! - -To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the -public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the -beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large -consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of -adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up -in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of -the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have -remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and -become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing -need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a -professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a -waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt -requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of -casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a -postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use--not to mention -the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were -his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. -He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of -other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding -he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first -author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work--his -impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in -this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"--that he -had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had -been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can -add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and -one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see -one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact -that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to -which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to -the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the -following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of -marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a -spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises -amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is -not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two -hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained -of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had -to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no -choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he -had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of -his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one -month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to -redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for -a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries -of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred -million dollars. - -Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced -in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to -heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? -Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the -distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy -with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to -follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book -because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"--for this he -had, in fact, become--he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might -say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular -enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the -same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the -proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns -to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he -who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten -days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative -principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at -least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, -gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make -millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of -authors--he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the -country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, -"reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone -of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions -a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing -themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them -three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if -his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift -and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he -is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, -impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against -the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it -with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he -has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, -"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means -of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He -"liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was -pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger -to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of -his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of -the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him--"here I -am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt -gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that? - -For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had -adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, -position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation -of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe. - -He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more -oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the -trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What -were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of -Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General -Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the -"Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. -It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it -was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for -getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were -secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost -consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish -weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own -shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what -he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly -confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for -a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, -penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain, -untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, -immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most -interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is -quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of -Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing -figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration -of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because -of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his -faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he -admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, -is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race -prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of -imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American -business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever -held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was -Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut -Yankee," had set out to make mediæval England a "going concern" could -hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that -phenomenon in all history. - -Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view -of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European -letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the -appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are -told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his -family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a -distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of -the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be -ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated -by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a -feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity -student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he -told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the -deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to -us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew -him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and -circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find -him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely -imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was -carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters -to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged -in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything -on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the -cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it -was in his power and his fame. - -Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in -the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set -against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, -Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the -headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and -infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has -seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with -complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept -as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding -materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing -so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In -1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a -Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of -improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested -that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he -was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the -great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the -framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far -Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the -colors of the privileged class which the new industrial régime had -brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a -member. - -His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his -essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in -the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to -his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence -and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends -the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for -the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets -the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy -which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more -nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the -tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, -against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I -finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every -time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay -the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not -a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy -of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish -to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, -"Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a -scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a -Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous -defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, -tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he -was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one -situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for -trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he -would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, -frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which -he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent -to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages -in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on -the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on -the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London -drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the -Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the -insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of -sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral -splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men -benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly -opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this -was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time -he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have -afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his -letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry -views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily -written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to -dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud -voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of -his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing -attendance on him!--how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not -hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly -have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the -principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic -victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one -situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate -the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; -and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his -dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an -article passionately advocating that the salaries of American -ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be -devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true -function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing -it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial -society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement. - -As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take -precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with -him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the -pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the -feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on -England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the -scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend -those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson -having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English -Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to -the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, -how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic -bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was -regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. -As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to -include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less -and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself -against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious -tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with -very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive -economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in -his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply -he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, -then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in -his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more -than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had -once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy -Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to -say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I -never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore -when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to -the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant -self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel -of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the -Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for -in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is -lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a -Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book -or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find -him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other -Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into -his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint -Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut -Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch -whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to -accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was -Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself -over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he -who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in -a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy -Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there -recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his -Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of -Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated. - -So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed -reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty -liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the -American nation in the hollow of his hand--the nation, or rather the -epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or -trump--but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home -with his public--he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to -pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he -does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored -family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from -every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark -Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause -would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that -matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole -neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a -unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, -had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor. - -Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character -he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an -uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an -expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his -surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naïve worship -of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical -inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of -subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this -let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I -have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, -spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at -all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And -once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular rôle and had -forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the -pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards -of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he -had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a -reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years -and an ass for fifty-five." - -It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's -instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of -literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was -merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any -other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination -for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other -business man--to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make -money because other people made money and to make more money than other -people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother -Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the -span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I -have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford -it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." -Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was -sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to -realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and -in the other that he had not lived it--for certainly his marriage had -not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public! -Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so -supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no -conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, -he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business -enterprise and of letters. - -"If Sam had got that pocket"--we remember the saying of his old -California comrade--"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of -his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent -of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he -have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes -happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and -perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its _débâcle_, Mark -Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to -stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, -"have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had -been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own -books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were -promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to -write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work -altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so -neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes -of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as -well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of -the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing -business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We -have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have -been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": -of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my -retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain -pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we -can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this -ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical -aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning -Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is -simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade -and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, -found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the -material rewards it brought him. - -How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point -of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those -middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised -men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to -the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the -hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. -Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the -literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's -cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how -Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a -personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the -word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as -against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic -of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the -Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain -disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the -Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to -mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her -husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as -nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the -illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was -identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his -brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting -Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion--At 12:20 this afternoon a -line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the -first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was -done _automatically_--instantly--perfectly. This is indeed the first -line of movable types that ever _was_ perfectly spaced and perfectly -justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the -immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. -Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well--dizzy, -stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human -brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful -mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how -wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered -the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was -fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, -too far away--as even his financial interest was too shallow, after -all--to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable -mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, -of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark -Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a -piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of -the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of -the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations -in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he -called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations -are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets -who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's -seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such -people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had -witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and -innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age -for having produced Walt Whitman. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - - - "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test - of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" - - JOHN STUART MILL. - - -We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in -Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America -indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we -recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to -the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every -influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of -opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the -real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling -Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which -had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real -Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained -rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a -child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this -childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual -independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work -as a writer. - -"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous -temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one -written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland -where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three -at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing -that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him -to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. -To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as -we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the -torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got -back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he -could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and -when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he -would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been -so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what -he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I -was the kind of person that _does_ things. Does them and reflects -afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without -asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that -time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been -punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and -reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I -still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and -reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition -of immaturity. - -Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for -gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the -fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed -dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes -of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had -the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were -staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go -down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an -elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at -the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the -dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to -this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he -added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went -back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came -down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a -really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. -To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like -descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place -where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous -at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully -protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk -waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was -seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along -the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the -dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for -his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do -the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. -When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at -Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford -pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was -"planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient -Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would -have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or -rather still, Tom Sawyer? - -Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense -of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of -his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not -Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell -that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a -literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not -affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so -increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our -political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where -that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to -have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and -economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his -traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social -tendencies that had so spectacular a _dénouement_ within four years of -his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the -century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's -funeral--"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, -"will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from -now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the -Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was -involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might -almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is -scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy -of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of -it--indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity -regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same -rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think -of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a -succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives -wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that -the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of -Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the -world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification -whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was -"entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political -history." - -And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark -Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. -Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of -sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, -political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would -expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for -example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It -requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious -little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the -communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade -every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the -sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? -Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most -conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly -unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all. - -And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped æsthetic -sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the -common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of -an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch -below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the -majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous -acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world -remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in -heaven":--"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to -have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in -matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is -mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going -to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did -he like? In painting, Landseer--"and the way he makes animals absolute -flesh and blood--insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little -and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could -tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the -beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and -that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than -any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs -America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, -Kipling--"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are -told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a -sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained -his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that -Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the -fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar -Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of -doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbô," -which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was -wholly non-æsthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could -stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. -He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's -"Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have -taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of -all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight -in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and -Thanatopsianism--in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the -most primitive form of æsthetic emotion, combined with just those tints -of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are -characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence. - -Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the -mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his -lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic -self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose -extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes -gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of -letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, -the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of -greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his -own juvenility freely registered itself. - -"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very -remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, -"but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have -developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... -he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even." - -I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the -fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has -been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; -she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been -the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, -childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm -perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of -that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was -in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in -upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of -happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual -and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, -Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children -themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house -always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider -scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish -hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by -trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an -energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have -guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells -reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; -admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, -there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story -of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that -story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown -men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy -was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds -the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps -that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it. - -Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there -ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His -mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and -without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off -as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which -would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from -his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable -were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable -to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was -super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was -doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe. - -Unused, half-used, misused--was ever anything like that energy? Mr. -Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because -his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of -darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing -himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, -because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to -the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant -trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of -gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, -unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to -turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the -final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest -as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead -lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, -thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. -Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been -published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't -have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's -letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His -mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance -that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature -tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's -way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the -fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded -manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts -about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the -interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer -Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in -1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly -tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family -censor--"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a -dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn -Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which -Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death--how many others -were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, -loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in -his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions--how -like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of -authority!--was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast -flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk--was it garrulous, was it not -rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an -undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, -following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, -outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind? - -An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty--could there be a -surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all -this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon -who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two -supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his -writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has -monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art. - -Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits -of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is--where -shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can -write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; -"but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I -didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't -play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that -years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a -play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine -articles and books--and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this -a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a -talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of -letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from -attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but -the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and -well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had -interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those -months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He -appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he -found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of -beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true -even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he -was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the -Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd -contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the -publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know -how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." -This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the -composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, -impossible performance"--no doubt because he had been able to write the -whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only -by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He -wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing -and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing -it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but -incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was -probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more -ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession -of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was -he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in -defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was -the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold. - -In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we -observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden -desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot -master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to -interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of -sustained interest in his work--his lack of interest in literature -itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of -his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the -technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, -surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his -æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by -æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems -to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in -literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. -Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had -never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother -had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, -he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of -Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, -in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane -Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper--is not -that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here -again there was a positive note--his lifelong preoccupation with -grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas -by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly -verbal!--"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful -German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's -Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," -"General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation -in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells -that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for -saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some -imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling -women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward -the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be -infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are -all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his -first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I -suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in -the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with -letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of -"Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring -from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing -off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to -take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially -never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well? - -Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man -is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his -taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some -slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" -having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years -after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright -copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, -although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to -understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, -obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human -spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The -Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark -Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the -expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through -the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican--all the galleries.... We -examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, -Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we -didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar -stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We -fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor -and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its -pet feature--there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and -Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a -hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, -more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known -was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the -American people of his time were simply the English middle class -transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to -Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to -have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife -and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had -subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his -mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an -old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream -of the "land of Egypt"--Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at -all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European -tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. -His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of -the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry -and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of -Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with -these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which -had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all -the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage. - -How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine -speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to -construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate -personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief -gifts--transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater -at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are -indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation -in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process -of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of -them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in -design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or -historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," -"Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom -Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he -said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he -assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon -his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose -in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the -Mississippi"--and even there it is the river itself and not its human -nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in -Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of -American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never -become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over -that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed -to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his -characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has -sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only -characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded -Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, -he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and -what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: -unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he -says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined -sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the -book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not -attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail -how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in -passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is -perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been -transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. -He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in -consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even -to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of -his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos -of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: -consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear -of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his -imagination. - -We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit -with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the -artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of -influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas -are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's -imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except -for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his -own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own -spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without -development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins--a -fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": -"Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost -entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private -venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not -to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. -When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded -by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal -experience. - -Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage -that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson -Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he -had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had -come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It -was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should -write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he -set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and -stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": -we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down -the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, -because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in -nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never -used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems -hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to -write for the _Atlantic_ and it is only then that fresh memories rise in -his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand -for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to -Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A -Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful -for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even -"Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not -spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the -story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in -him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in -another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells -to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written -for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and -slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to _The Atlantic_," says Mr. -Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and -before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to -work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of -it are condemned here and there and yonder." - -Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious -"laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary -sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at -the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on -authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that -to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but -what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose -luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, -especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in -bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy -comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that -indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to -spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no -doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his -matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether -useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too -seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent -assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, -and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign -that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of -those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with -all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a -boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a -journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the -goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low -that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged -him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the -capitalist régime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of -reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system -in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare -himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was -predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 -of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very -last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide -repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: -'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one -imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But -who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from -a lazy line? - -It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can -explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was -subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take -notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make -speeches." That innocent _réclame_ of his, that irresistible passion for -the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to -have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his -inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart -had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For -court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living -that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done -worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four -months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on -the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one -of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was -dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into -which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed -into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been -able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that -rôle the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" -he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to -be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." -And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that -he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing -quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the -truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent -youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them -into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of -being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of -his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who -certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a -passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the -last man gave out from sheer exhaustion." - -For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his -work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an -increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly -have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We -remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the _Quaker -City_ excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically -meaningless to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless that it -seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in -my mind as a pleasant memory.... An accusing conscience gives me peace -only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it -but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by -the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to -penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the -change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the -Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from -"art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and -duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the -first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier, -"before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river -itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his -task explaining, in that connection, the difference between -"theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just -so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more -so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the -'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has -become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that -descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an -absolutely certain financial success--how repellant it became to him as -time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the -self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell -that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't -have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, -and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and -propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down -went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he -had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief? -"The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to -finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A -Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it. -He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted -child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a -charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the -moment in the approval of his wife. - -We have seen--and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his -arrested development--that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for -literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What -is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in -his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think--over-expressed -it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so--in something he wrote once -of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as -we say, more than for aught else whatever--cared for them with that kind -of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond -votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a -refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect -freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark -Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My -right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write -this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it--no, I mean 1,000,000--next -fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't -have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have -been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost -cynical indifference, of insolence even. - -Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a -significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the -creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, -"his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on -his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far -behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and -it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his -best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his -judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and -certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can -take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything -but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with -such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object -in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had -approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the -craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how -exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!--"possibly the book may -not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." But more -striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven -times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of -preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation -and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously -exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in -that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully. -What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for -"Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he -had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own -fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular -pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them -anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from -the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious -ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of -indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey -of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve -years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his -delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine, -the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying--that spirit which -came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly -gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which -tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the -dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a _réchauffé_ for children, -for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no -doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely -treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the -book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never -known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains -in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship. - -If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine -the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same -time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive -stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession, -have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think -of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was, -says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw.... -On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably -would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence -due?--"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all -but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with -all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent, -prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in -one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get -a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his -"laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform, -and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought -always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice -of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have -said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in -fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his -essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the -_raconteur_ of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is -just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of -mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of -the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a -boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land -because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him -reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had -remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To -tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper -places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at -last--oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control, -to spring that final effect of horror!--there was something worthy of a -man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in -his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable -through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and -training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age -of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, -to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had -Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential -authority, with that old negro _raconteur_, that old pilot of the -Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark -Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his -best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, -the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as -often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had -expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at -least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at -least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: -in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring -masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and -thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass -muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the -others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, -inherited folk-skill--he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist -ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his -_métier_, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever -more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going -his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. -Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual -consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had -remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural -genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with -which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he -found open before him. - -It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life -should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it -now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and -why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The -autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on -hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because -they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore, -that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it -is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either -internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until -it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open -and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary -number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the -surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which -is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the -American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial -success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse, -characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find -him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an -absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885, -at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained -his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you -can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had -"assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he -had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was -the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually -recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote _con -amore_ were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not -only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something -in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he -was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men--that was the -public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business -men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the -phrase, "children of a larger growth"? - -Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he -seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" -could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly -"Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. -But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom -Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he -associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a -publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" -and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic -consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its -real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, -all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious -Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, -though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. -Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is -clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys -through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its -bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de -Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with -love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this -happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says -that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best -book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown -in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to -a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it -on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One -might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a -hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays -which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of -the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift -stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering -itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books -alone--these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering -on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the -ground. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - - - "Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters." - - ALEXANDER HARVEY. - - - -At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going -through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of -men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a -certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you -would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, -however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is -only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the -guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack -and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact -this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the -imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the -trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another -self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you -perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has -become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in -the twinkling of an eye. - -So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no _real_ morals," he wrote in one -of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and -preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." -Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality -of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but -upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial -morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, -as we have seen, had conformed to a moral régime in which the -profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been -submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the -respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to -depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the -explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self -had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had -concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct -of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that -instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and -manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never -having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to -air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were -black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning -Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant -blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on -it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the -conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it. - -First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he -was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social -régime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious -self urged him to maintain these values and this régime. His unconscious -self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him -in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his -story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the -famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, -he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse -races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with -his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi -diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his -best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two -incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the -symbol of Mark Twain himself. - -Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged -on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was -always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the -floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by -apprehensions--badgered, harassed"--and let us add Mr. Paine's -adjectives--"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset," -till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent -the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he -always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his -will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant, -fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental -desire pointed him just the other way? - -Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had -submerged himself in the rôle of the husband, the father, the neighbor, -the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His -absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development -of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain -was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house -was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own -drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent -caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the -householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one -observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting -against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being -"bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and -tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and -wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." -Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or -getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results -too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain -became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only -just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, -he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so -extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which -developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one -of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and -the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with -her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have -been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not -qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone -who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose -myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which -the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other -caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old -Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic -protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. -Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's -constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found -in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely -inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. -We can see from this that although his conscious life had been -overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, -his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature. - -And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of -Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that -"heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations -like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists -mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate, -that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of -Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness -and priggishness of his own _entourage_? I should go even further, I -should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark -Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had -regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially; -Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for -gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written -to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted -classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of -the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be -as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the -encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; -but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of -fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language. -But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's -literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he -"detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written -by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored -them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have -despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste -was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a -par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his -wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had -accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his -unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to -please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything -about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's -criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude -of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious -self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how -strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself -directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its -teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated -bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic -aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the -repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend -Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, -and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a -companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he -roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried -self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a -prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model. - -We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious -observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when -the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked -on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies -behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were -together on a lecture tour?--"You will never, never know, never divine, -guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made -until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has -taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and -troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke -of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." -His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for -Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," -he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them--they have found a -hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in -fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. -White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar -books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors--after -Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot--were Pepys, Suetonius and -Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, -and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the -cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such -passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely -"spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is -Man?"--"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. -For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I -ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other -difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when -at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: -"Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as -unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, -kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (_and -could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not -I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no -other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which -his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for -Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually -praising their "unrestrained frankness." - -And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of -parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark -Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he -wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. -Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over -Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he -would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold -fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism -was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been -permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to -ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. -Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the -time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the -English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and -assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could -not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the -riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he -poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of -a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at -a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity -among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, -has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard -one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that -are current in every New York publishing house? - -In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful -ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through -the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the -unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait -for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the -_outré_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia -Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark -Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon -upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and -they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and -thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it -from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily -search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and -oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in -order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they -were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort -of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the -texture of Mark Twain's writings. - -For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through -with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In -the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. -In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been -prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or -by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship -which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some -contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, -are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In -such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully -satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a -compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two -railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms -of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud -has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any -reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we -are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious -bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those -embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that -express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies -wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon -which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or -rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this -process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, -certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am -writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some -manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On -these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be -straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." -When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead -Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was -frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote -his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about -himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia -of his soul. - -Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, -for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the -first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is -proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the -book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American -Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he -wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. -Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly -expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to -be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that -never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion -mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself -once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in -short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed -were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that -sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such -times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all -sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits -of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible -animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort -on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a -propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved -abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to -literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in -the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally -been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian -monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant -farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce -to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing -circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but -two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed -the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. -That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed -further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it -stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of -passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry -satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, -that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far -relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the -battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our -very eyes. - -Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of -"wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is -surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the -celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward -J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the -Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they -made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the -celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this -Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him. - -Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate -of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is -the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by -the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note -the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the -unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is -a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu -of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. - -This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead -Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with -Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an -author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that -Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he -continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply -another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the -same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been -privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar, -with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; -appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and -fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful -of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But -irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for -it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided -without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson -was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt -for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him -before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a -genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed -here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets -generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his -scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't -it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired -Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it -possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was -picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? -Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures -Pudd'nhead out-manoeuvring the village folk and triumphing over them -in the end. - -Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame -and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more -or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says -Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally -and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were -never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. -For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of -self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and -that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one -but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole -community--of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by -leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield -and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted -incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens," -the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all -those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his -true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and -admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it--it was -these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon -him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who -took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their -hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a -deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in -the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the -misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, -the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to -recognize its divinity? - -Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the -"wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the -desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself -in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the -suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells -about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body -"a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, -far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no -chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale -of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of -a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old -castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into -subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation -for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that. -As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American -Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age," -who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after -one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his -own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful -claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those -fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure -projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business -life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet -forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true -rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark -Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to -account for his constant preoccupation with this idea. - -Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his -old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that -flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and -fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have -been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in -himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese -Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the -usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle -perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and -"The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that constitutes "The Prince -and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the rôle of the -beggar-boy--Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn -himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the -Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically -slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of -incompatibles bound together in one flesh--the Extraordinary Twins, the -"good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad" -boy of whom society disapproves--how many of Mark Twain's stories and -anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!--does he -not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history -of his life? - -We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was -expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become -owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the -poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American -progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," -the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the -discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more -wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been -discussing, however, we can see that while the censorship had been -sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his -unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to -cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his -saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like -Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant," -thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where -"prosperity and position constitute rank." Here, as in the malevolent, -Mephistophelian "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we -perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save -his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained -fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his -finger-print invention--otherwise he would find something better to do -than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how -could you expect a young English snob to know anything about democracy? -That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his -readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would -know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the -great American game of bluff they would have to forgive _him_! As long -as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short, -he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the -public in the hollow of his hand, knew it. - -It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand -the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn." -Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little -boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let -himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the -writing and the fate of this book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to -have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the -publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain! -Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pass the -censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an -irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this -world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization. -That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity -we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting -to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons -attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to -find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he -can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive! -Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness -are so many shields behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of -the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his -unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical -passages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the -mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by -the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has -the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: -"There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The -withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the -sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in -his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism -in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have -appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the -lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial -detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation. -"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," -says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable -on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!--that raft and that -river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole -unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds -and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of -the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"? -Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was -not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright, -shining arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is -because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that -gave it its momentum. - -Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was -intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the rôle of a demiurge, in -fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and -misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for -this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed! -Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs, -petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the -domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those -second parents who had taken the place of his first--we have to thank -it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and -general revolt of Huckleberry Finn: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; - she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - - "Well, everybody does that way, Huck." - - "Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I - can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub - comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that - way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in - a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. - Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got - to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to - git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder - wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she - wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before - folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now - these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I - ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...." - -This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see -what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - - - "To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is - nobler and less trouble." - - _Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._ - - -And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant -Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he -was in revolt against a rôle which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust -upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc" -anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark -Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous -writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other -than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, -we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic -development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this -career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that -found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his -decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious -and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige -had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark -Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and -what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and -at the same time achieved such ample material rewards. - -It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we -have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; -and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency -who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a -humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he -was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of -Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. -Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, -sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of -chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous -cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society -required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems -to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a -distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition--the -battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it -seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, -when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is -the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind -it." - -Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark -Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that -in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found -that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his -diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do _hate_ to go -back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from -mining. "We fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada -as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman -say, the other day, that it was the 'd----dest country under the -sun'--and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never -rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green -thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the -purest--most unadulterated and uncompromising--_sand_." And as with the -setting--so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, -"the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on -him": more than once he found it necessary--this young man of -twenty-eight--"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat -Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs -and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." -That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own -testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d----n San Francisco style -of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made -his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands--"God, what a contrast with -California and the Washoe"!--ever sweet and blessed in his memory. -Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was -this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also -call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which -also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of -his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he -was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was -always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill -his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr. -Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic -waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of -the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam -swear."--Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was -living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation. - -Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of -pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life. -It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with -domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that -sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as -we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was, -nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or -satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were -civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom -civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable -avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which -their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, -they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were -blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, -that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children -were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how -hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining -population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex -tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single -monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which -kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse -in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually -impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept -a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to -conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask -of a rough good-fellowship that found expression mainly in the nervously -and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the -gambling-hell. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which -peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, -quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the very pick and choice of -the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing -It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or -decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed -hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon -the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof -of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed. - -Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that -life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the -fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The -gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an -outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of -masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the -intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the -human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering -one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps -the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was -almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the -day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so -common--that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the -newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his -old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated -duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of -chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser -degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the -pioneers? - -But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that -individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and -preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering -itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but, -victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not -withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from -openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already -pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers -in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were -always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in -calling a relief from restraint. - -We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were -subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the -most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most -complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances -where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most -general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was -the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a -life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the -necessity of making money, of succeeding--the same impulse had brought -him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain -was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from -attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised -and because to have done so would have required just those expressions -of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other -hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of -all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those -outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his -companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never -"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged -physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. -"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty -years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have -lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still -retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that -would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out -into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in -the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his -instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had -to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a -life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he -became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of -individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship of public -opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada. - -Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some -kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, -since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, -had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the -artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, -far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark -Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in -order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he -acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his -individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, -his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different" -or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how -urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society -where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself -by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his -profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing -at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see -from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of -his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was -always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his -humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men -laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short, -of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief -in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those -acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of -consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious -jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will -hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he -could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those -conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this -vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time -keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming -his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a -relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose -investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, -the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of -expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic -effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke -or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely -safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist -in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of -those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of -one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than -the editors had spoken each of the other")--his comrades were able, -without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own -exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred -and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship -that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain -himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to -maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the -position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader. - -For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular -ferocity. The very titles of his Western I sketches reveal their general -character: "The Dutch Nick Massacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing -Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Cæsar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in -the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his -labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the -doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the -phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to -kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead -Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape -hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It -began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a -special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; -but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was -"unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, -the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, -in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt -officials--we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own -painfully honest brother Orion--were frankly afraid of him. "He was very -far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any -way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even -from trying to be a humorist! - -Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik -Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, -found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all -that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down -upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not -enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man -with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same -way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own -childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of -Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged -by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his -antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of -satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest -of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in -him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his -pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated -and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike -he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is -the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in -corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of -things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not -seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was -an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, -their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change -things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a -counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very -moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive -instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to -express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have -led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an -end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as -human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired -Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief -they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could -not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been -compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He -had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a -campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine -says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As -a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote -criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the -result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco -papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a -correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we -are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long -restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the -"humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in -California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from -expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in -short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to -remain a humorist. - -In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover -the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who -found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter -of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no -value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same -trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." -Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he -had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps -we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor -consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't -know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as -surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists -of a sort who lack the courage to admit it. - -Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I -say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to -carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of _The Galaxy,_ to -which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct -a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" -his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a -humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have -already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the -pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the -rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business -men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. -The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for -ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national -demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by -Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at -last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact. - -I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the -Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of -Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly -homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we -have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile -because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or -restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us -feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile _because_! -In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The -"cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all -his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and -as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far -from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in -these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and -even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark -Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches -in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, -lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small -harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances -of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; -but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, -all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the -same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than -the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's -humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the -same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is -to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" -that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us -from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to -murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from -the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us -to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a -phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the -last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is -the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the -demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he -made upon his environment, had become, _pari passu_, progressively more -stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as -barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why -perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment -favorable for a régime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who -has risen," the typical American, himself a business man? - -Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of -succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but -complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the -stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general -"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been -characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation -was practically organized--by a sort of common consent--on the plan of -a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed -to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and æsthetic -development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised -the success of the business régime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark -Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to -the efficiency of this business régime, because it helped to maintain -the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as -it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the -Western pioneer. - -As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business -man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the -"strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an -aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he -find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way -and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an -aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, -diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the -creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic -coöperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts -for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that -expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." -Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional -freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a -retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: -consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, -confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On -the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, -everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, -reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and -responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual -and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor -does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought--and -especially irreverent toward them!--when they gave him a seat below the -salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and -absurd everything of a spiritual, æsthetic and intellectual nature the -recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the -smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as -we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at -antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an -infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being. -That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a -hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the -spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, -involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader -to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional -stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all -these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure -in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much -as the pioneer. - -Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether -they corroborate this argument. - -In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself -seated directly behind a young girl: - - How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she - would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own - thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer - pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy - dreams,--no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit - still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of - a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young - figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the - gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, - tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy - cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy - rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and - so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did - mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red - lips parted, and out leaped her thought,--and with such a - guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just _know_ - I've got five hundred fleas on me!" - -This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its -tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all -the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them -so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in -hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, -prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting -into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a -pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by -a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself -evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no -longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a -butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in -the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to -his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions. - -Another example, the famous "oesophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph -of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story": - - It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The - lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, - hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge - provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that - have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; - the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow - flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep - of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous - flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty - sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; - everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of - God. - -We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury -of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its -various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most -careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's -sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation -of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and -thus divert the reader's feeling for it. - -To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life -of the man with an eye single to the main chance--that, one would almost -say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one -of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house -down in order to roast his pig--he destroys, that is to say, an entire -complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single -sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are -manifestations of just that personal, æsthetic or moral distinction -which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish. -Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on -General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous -assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the -human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of -the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success -of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the -final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a -democratic régime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition -of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the -fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a -business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is, -however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious -schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," -says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather -hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him -into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark -Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that -in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for -this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook -his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To -exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our -humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from -any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be -abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" -was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of -beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd -pioneer business man. - -How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The -Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological -moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of -industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become -obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it -was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe! -Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's -own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything -of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were -ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be -ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual -development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that -would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too -costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not -only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate -pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as -Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and -all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind -were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, -yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was -notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial -philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in -civilization, of modern America. "I find your people--your best people, -I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only -talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's -novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there -seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in -their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of -the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of -cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The -Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's "Leaves of -Grass," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one -hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Grass," -having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its -whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that -is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the -individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a -commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true -spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring -every traveling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure of -its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so -far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and -the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far -as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing -satisfaction of Americans with a banker's paradise in which, as long as -it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled. - -So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. I -think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought -him. And are we not already in a position to see why the rôle of -humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, -why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own -development? - -Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of -the artist. It meant the suppression of his æsthetic desires, the -degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How -can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end -becoming the victim of his own habit? - -I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved -the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and -delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love -for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for -charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the -Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish -knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands -on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing -something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business -man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation -of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he -continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more -advanced æsthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one -of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the -irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: -one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually -"taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty -becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of -art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven." -In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions -of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. -Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective -coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by -stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself -a scarred child. - -He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day -come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal -humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was -satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great -purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of -which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was -he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he -lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the -"sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his -proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of -moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual -position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating -stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the -indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the -energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became -but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his -"high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by -saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as -fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of -harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that -world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked -everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an -endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that -equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out -of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can -appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after -all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief -life-saver." - - - - -CHAPTER X - -LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - - - "No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence - of ladies." - - _A Double-Barrelled Detective Story_. - - -"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your -works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political -tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain -himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant -intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle which he was, if one may say -so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. -Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with -Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, -Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, -that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him -thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that -extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance -of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the -wish for the deed? - -What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds -up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the -inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is -Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the -obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up to the measure -on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, -intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the -intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism -of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is -embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely -conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain -cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he -did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government -his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly -speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and -government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil -community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view -of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes -for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the -fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? -Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social -life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of -our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own -humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the -support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities -and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw -bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else -begin." - -It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be -sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his -nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, -despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, -he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand -for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so -involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he -could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his -friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to -him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen -that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great -impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even -feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the -wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead -of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and -even flattered it. - -If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to -be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the -puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author -of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of -sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to -divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his -generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric -clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled -away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. -But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are -beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in -assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills -out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been. - -When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small -change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty -aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos -of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see -that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he -says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity -toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct -without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing -from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his -father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's -a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He -delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms -as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after -to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who -is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as -impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at -night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One -was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't -say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was -interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle -Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and -it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of -interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the -continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages -indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior -cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the -satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can -substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has -abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark -Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his -instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, -political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in -private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave -conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made -progress--the first progress in 'ages and ages'--colossal progress. In -what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which -add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But -the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The -materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that -there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was -before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is -a vast change (due to them) in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and -all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme -ideal--all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations -named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the -world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This -lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, -dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of -Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that -he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the -great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, -that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his -friends were the unconscious agents of the business régime, bent upon -deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have -seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering? - -Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was -perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed -into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what -did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country -some of these days when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the -spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich -writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark -Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary -confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the -financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path -of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a -brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read -'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a -cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked -on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those -days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 -or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, -excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to -eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry -Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by -the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great -centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. -If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have -been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested -for his first important book--"The New Pilgrim's Progress"--was regarded -in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing -Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only -when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed -to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but -loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same -gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: -it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose -"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is -obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to -attack them? - -His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it -is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," -that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the -frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a -sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the -readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he -could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky -note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, -that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of -the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" -lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the -case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not -noticing these little spots on the American sun? - -In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems -frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen -that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief -embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been -the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of -speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are -all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and -generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and -politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there -are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed -out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly -animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact -the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand -old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its -devasting irony about every American institution save family -life--Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education -and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's -final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet -the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth -lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain -number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to -redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so--for the story -was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford--by -making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up -young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the -softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, -for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had -the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? -"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but -had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He -welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint -authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a -return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; -Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the -sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one -might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the -West. - -Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an -accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was -too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this -earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg"--not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever -again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of -industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great -Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as -"a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we -know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had -once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, -"that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too -often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that -having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels -backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he -feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the -seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth -century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century -France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The -Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again -the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a -contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the -"Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark -Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King -Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on -corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he -not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who -are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's -biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, -begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form -that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to -estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, -in his private memoranda--"do right and you will be conspicuous." - -Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's -intention and failure in his predestined rôle, the "Connecticut Yankee" -itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the -most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. -Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in -writing it. - -What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he -says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for -America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their -sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to -me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good -intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level -of manhood in turn." - -No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have -blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of -him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. -Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating -gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always -have been slightly irritating--he was irritating even at home, and how -much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to -dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw -red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon -General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, -an attack upon America _and_ upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark -Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book -as the publisher of General Grant, upon his _amour-propre_ as the -countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like -a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a -typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're -another!"--just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul -Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to -put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis -and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of -the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a -frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could -not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities -like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't -tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all -that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered -both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole -English race, indeed, to come and knock them off. - -Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a -satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in -the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, -unconsciously, into a sort of _bouleversement_ of all his actual -personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds -himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up -the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher -level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but -to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In -short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to -do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee -mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours -ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of -the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were -sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages. - -Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's -genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did -not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle -years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his -letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was -absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can -see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A -Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old -Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and -Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to -Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and -thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear -date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my -word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there -was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I -to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; -there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this -progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of -Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that -he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he -proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to -those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something -rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a -land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being -possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up -to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the -inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average -rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous -wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the -seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about -that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected -from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it -might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of -space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he -calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there -is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace--_the approval of -his neighbors and the public_. And perhaps there is something which he -dreads more than he dreads pain--the _disapproval_ of his neighbors and -the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the -disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their -approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous -letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by -deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only -wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in -even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated -classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always -hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to -instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can -get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to -"pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its -objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles -of simple folk! They are the most successful of all. - -The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark -Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection -and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he -records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here -if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. -Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its -institutions"--its institutions, observe--"its fair rural aspects, he -had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; -against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so -admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons -for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed -him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first -English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many -of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English -readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark -Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class -of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that -Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful -heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? -But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, -as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid -its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their -hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, -merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately -desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have -already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of -this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was -this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely -personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in -reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark -that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was -his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public -figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, -in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his -responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of -humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with -him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was -measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without -hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like -the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people -immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the -situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford -neighbors, who had taken him into _their_ hearts and homes?--that was -the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could -not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned -enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize--he was -boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to -satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize -not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won. - -Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine -tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was -badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was -highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the -"Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business -with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author, -we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the -publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be -popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have -been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the -top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the -exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial -pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make -King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?-- -"Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck -and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest -field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the -English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting -the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the -great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks -neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he -wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain -had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the -spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the -magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, -less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also. - -"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it." -Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that -remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable -only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long -deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom -Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be -read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find -him adding: "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." Tell the truth or trump--but get the -trick! - -Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal -processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, -that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success -and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two -letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who -was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive -feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, -as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings -and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable -way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for -his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody -contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, -Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to _mail_ this letter; he understands -that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no -harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a -volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his -crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he -would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one -writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a -very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot -embers in it here and there." - -Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask -himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he -accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the -priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the -accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and -cannot employ it. - -Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark -Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he -finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to -dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. -To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the -premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the -most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, -that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would -have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been -arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those - illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, - obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the - Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war - into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all - respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I - taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to - modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. - MARK. - - DEAR COLONEL--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a - lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK. - -And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that -he announced he was going to show it to the Czar: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the - illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing - but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war - with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty - centuries history will not get done admiring these men who - attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved - it. MARK TWAIN. - -Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful -fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To -Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' -stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had -told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. -'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up -and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. -'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men -can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' -He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he -was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions -and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! -And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in -this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment -to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible -playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars -up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to -support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation." - -Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain -was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes -to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far -more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was -always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to -America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his -aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him -a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious -wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into -the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir -in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position -carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders -to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal -ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, -was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of -reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who -appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. -"The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more -intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the -affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and -punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure -punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a -cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts -which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all -respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I -think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, -boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect -upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or -Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an -assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of -"brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most -pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer. - -This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the -Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who -attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other -hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what -everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society -Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but -monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who -took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in -actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it -appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, -as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the -nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, -the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could -not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the -spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, -for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the -spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was -personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. -Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to -print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion -behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was -the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents -Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by -disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered -the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own -genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a -whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold -quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding. - -Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old -age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared -to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's -biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled -satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an -impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those -merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance -upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him -to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer -interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his -childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; -he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of -his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he -imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. -He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought -in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, -"needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have -done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we -see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and -Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. -Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he -never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The -religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he -meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't -he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those -theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes -about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from -his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his -environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think -of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make -people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with -infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to -curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes -in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, -in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells -Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs -and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. -2006--which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment -of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," -saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so -far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs -one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the -trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the -publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk. - -Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered -life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had -found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth -and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The -absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous -conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's -pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven -is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote -in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he -dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a -single feature in it that he _actually values_. It consists--utterly -and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on -the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do -not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are -singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about -two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in -a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not -many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have -variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you -have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented -a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is -like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too -rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the -tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, -in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent -impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of -"Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, -something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the -civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the -illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what -civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in -his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a -world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen -it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, -"until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating -sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut -Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, -and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted -nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim -of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of -life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol -promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that -is pathology. - -Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was -always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he -oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture -of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification -or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the -satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an -ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, -never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also -that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the -works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 -Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. -Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a -man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and -looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a -billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it -with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might -say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect -it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have -the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the -picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is -able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple -contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never -completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they -invariably led into this _cul-de-sac_. If life is really futile, then -writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make -life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility -is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it -might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it _is_ -full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present -sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never -attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in -the air. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -MUSTERED OUT - - - "... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the - others were all still asleep." DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI. - - -And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly -liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him -and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his -defeat. - -"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday -speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe -no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a -time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your -term, well or less well, and you are mustered out." - -What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon -his life? - -"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," -"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived -in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the -public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we -print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries -and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot -had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once -and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the -creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and -he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write -frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of -Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you -ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose -opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic -naïveté of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought -or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential -priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross -and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, -immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt -contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your -immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined -to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found -out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is -true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence -of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so -doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far -from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering -forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of -youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; -you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of -the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain -thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out." - -His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy -years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and -awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have -oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon -your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck -Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with -Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in -this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has -become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, -unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant -growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in -matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of -national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches -now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played -this rôle in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the -clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain -perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": -the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world -as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd -it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly -fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous -nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the -more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the -vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon -the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of -the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any -one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general -spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who -said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize -that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for -the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient -earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything -essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was -always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of -thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three -times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a -watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the -farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the -gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own -career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the -sort of courage he described in his story "Luck." - -"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so -little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak -out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he -continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same -seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor -(privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my -conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. -There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal -to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said -some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will -not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did -he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise -we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not -rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long -habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double -personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to -redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and -comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had -kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not -sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had -kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of -the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old -imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long -deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How -it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a -little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark -Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the -truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week -he found that he no longer had the strength. - -Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to -Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing -for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and -have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance -to write a book without reserves--a book which should take account of no -one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, -illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my -heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I -judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is -under way, now, and it _is_ a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book -was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing -it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his -desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil -upon the passion that possessed him. At once this craving reasserted -itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?" -He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his -friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he -felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire -still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind -on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a -mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path -out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he -writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden -emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous, -however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into -later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men -in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him": -there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth -now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth--anything that it would -hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored -the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother -Orion to write an autobiography that would spare nobody's feelings and -would let all the cats out of the bag: "Simply tell your story to -yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing," he -had told him. Let Orion do it! we can almost hear him whispering to -himself; and Orion had done it. "It wrung my heart," wrote Mr. Howells -of that astounding manuscript, "and I felt haggard after I had finished -it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had -found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was -himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as -Mr. Paine tells us, "a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even -his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down." To write such -a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed -what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for -autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for -confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to -redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something -unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who -spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in -the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of -himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and -plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be -mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom," -he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, -"because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with -theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; -you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm -and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's -indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells, -who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really -indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast -advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against -the sluice-gates of a human soul? - -At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to -be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his -autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he -has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter--the passage is to -be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my -seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six -hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published -in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish -and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall -continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It -is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some -folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons -mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is -something awful." - -You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has -been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a -debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things -about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to -shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about -her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three -"playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but -still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and -Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright -campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in -Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to -exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of -humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the -use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain -universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human -soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that -whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and -space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are -so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your -pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the -mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of -cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going -to have--what magnificently wicked fun! - -You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own -redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book -it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And -what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy -occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are -going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were -published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were -carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in -reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it -in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the -courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his -soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among -the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_ -gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been -dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have -thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I -am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on -paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired -when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I -should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike -them out when I came to revise this book." - -Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark -Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge -Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be -a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the -person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture -to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved -himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what -inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral -slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense -that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to -communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is -Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the -writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will -in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was -incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors. -There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, -if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of -founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at -Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market -value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; -but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was -not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without -the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his. -"It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is -nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys, -in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the -fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had -a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to -publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge -of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually -shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably -have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was -received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _exposé_ of -philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just, -that very generous public verdict--for the book is, in fact, quite -worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain--he must have -felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular rôle of a -Mephistopheles. - -With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the -repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that -civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen -from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference -and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported -by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm -heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and -oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of -the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable -corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in -South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; -Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the -Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering -the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark -Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of -the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive, -the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of -all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore -this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and -weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it -was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone -aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic -attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following -the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his -book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and -"A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against -bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him. -Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his -"Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the -forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit. -Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who -have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the -sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark -Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, -equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juarès and the -volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of -a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level, -and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his -animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and -despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself. - -The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his -energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or -another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly -destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a -will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my -feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on -paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become -definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his -great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can -doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks! -Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he -not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department -on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, -when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, -when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible -passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle -pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day -and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not -a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I -have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end -to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says? -Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human -race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was -it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for -means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian -Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy -frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack -upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the -failure in himself. - -And this failure was the failure of the artist in him. - -Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy -in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life -which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire -except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel, -and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old -masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with -anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it -and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I -have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to -do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort -would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what -had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious -sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The -Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime -creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator -of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an -impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born -artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist -destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in -the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious -he is, even this early, of all æsthetic pretensions! What a fierce -grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the -perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle, -he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all -Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of -tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the -peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a -low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark -Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; -he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is -the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to -desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp -unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously -desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, -why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to -produce only one himself, and that a failure. - -We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative -life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates -nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a -machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the -animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he -said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say -nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of -the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is -astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a -retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could -have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind. -But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging -his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off -the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in -the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults -him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in -Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle -expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to -believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon -knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer--see what Macaulay says! Macaulay, -heaven bless us all!--therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark -Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry -Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the -sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who -asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training -makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce -that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written. -But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel -Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had -not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can -hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to -follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession -revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on -faith. - -How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of -his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently -that it was "like the sky--you can't break through anywhere." How much -it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an -irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to -do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in -Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius -is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its -eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior -circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, -upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his -intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for -the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe -with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and -unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no -outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no -outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a -valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would -have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced -something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, -associations and training. In France he would have produced something -better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and -training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to -Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is -enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we -can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking -reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his -half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as -"large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age. - -Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that -we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order -to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, -destroy us, we embrace them with an _amor fati_, to escape from the -contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave -who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, -finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the -possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself. -The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly -temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, -nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep -emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it -honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the -slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and -thirst for freedom. - -Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential -force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in -Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that -fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If -the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in -fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for -greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued -against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will: -he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a -will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose -regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no -spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where -success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is -a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place -of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the -first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be -weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that -Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it -is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How -well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain! -"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human -being is under training. It is his human environment which influences -his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his -road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself -shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval -he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the -way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the -tragedy of it. - -Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark -Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human -mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine -anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a -single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind -from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind -carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which -act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All -day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and -without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 -thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before -his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain -cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as -the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and -controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental -machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of -ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any -help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the -multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen -minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases. -It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite -of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely -independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better -have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark -Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, -chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks -and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't -listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and -wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of -personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, -that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in -these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with -each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book -regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch -inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal -conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the -end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul! - -The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary -psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance. -And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express -through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I -generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not -those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these -"three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me -at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in -the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life -that has been unfolded in these pages. - -"There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being -in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a -living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about -those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought -that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I -am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell -whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. - -"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to -the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am -always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be -funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only -making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they -commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing -there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." - -I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas -that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark -Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to -think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought -of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow," -the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself -inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second -dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing -self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream -worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always -"trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has -lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great -surrender. - -Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment -when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda -packet: - -"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which -the title-rôle of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of -this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The -other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon -him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at -me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out -of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't -want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always -expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'" - -No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have -had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; -but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for -good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess -alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity -of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said -Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks -and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have -ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born -artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that -he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be -"original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship -even over his neckties--the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, -has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily! - -And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about -on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most -ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, -the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by -all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic -sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the -end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an -illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the -creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those -three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of -conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is -the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own -conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He -was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that -has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for -missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says -John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, -"who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of -things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the -end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability -begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new -turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces -of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confrères -have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask -yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and -walk the stage as poets do. - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42225-8.txt or 42225-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/2/2/42225/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - - - -</pre> <h1>THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN</h1> @@ -8101,378 +8068,7 @@ walk the stage as poets do.</p> -<pre> - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42225-h.htm or 42225-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/2/2/42225/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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diff --git a/42225.txt b/42225.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 40c6497..0000000 --- a/42225.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8316 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - -BY - -VAN WYCK BROOKS - - -"_Think it over, dear B--! A man's gifts are_ -_not a property: they are a duty."_ - ---IBSEN'S _Letters_ - - -1922 - -LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN - - - - -TO E.S.B. - - - - -CONTENTS - - - - I. INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - II. THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - III. THE GILDED AGE - IV. IN THE CRUCIBLE - V. THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - VI. EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - VII. THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - VIII. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - IX. MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - X. LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - XI. MUSTERED OUT - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - - - - -CHAPTER I - -INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - - - "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the - deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the - race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and - for the same reason."--_Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's - books._ - - -To those who are interested in American life and letters there has been -no question of greater significance, during the last few years, than the -pessimism of Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his own -friends and contemporaries were rather inclined to make light of his -oft-expressed belief that man is the meanest of the animals and life a -tragic mistake. - -For some time before his death Mark Twain had appeared before the public -in the role less of a laughing philosopher than of a somewhat gloomy -prophet of modern civilization. But he was old and he had suffered many -misfortunes and the progress of society is not a matter for any one to -be very jubilant about: to be gloomy about the world is a sort of -prerogative of those who have lived long and thought much. The public -that had grown old with him could hardly, therefore, accept at its face -value a point of view that seemed to be contradicted by so many of the -facts of Mark Twain's life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him -intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of -his "pose" regarding "the damned human race," and we know the opinion of -his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was "not a pessimist in his -heart, but only by premeditation." These views were apparently borne out -by his own testimony. "My temperament," he wrote, shortly after the -death of his daughter Jean, "has never allowed my spirits to remain -depressed long at a time." That he remained active and buoyant to the -end was, in fact, for his associates, sufficient evidence that his -philosophical despair was only an anomaly, which had no organic part in -the structure of his life. - -Was it not natural that they should feel thus about him, those -contemporaries of his, so few of whom had seen his later writings and -all the tell-tale private memoranda which Mr. Paine has lately given to -the world? What a charmed life was Mark Twain's, after all! To be able -to hold an immense nation in the hollow of one's hand, to be able to -pour out into millions of sympathetic ears, with calm confidence, as -into the ears of a faithful friend, all the private griefs and intimate -humors of a lifetime, to be called "the King" by those one loves, to be -so much more than a king in reality that every attack of gout one has is -"good for a column" in the newspapers and every phrase one utters -girdles the world in twenty minutes, to be addressed as "the Messiah of -a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents"--what -more could Tom Sawyer, at least, have wished than that? And Mark Twain's -fame was not merely one of sentiment. If the public heart was moved by -everything that concerned him,--an illness in his household, a new -campaign against political corruption, a change of residence, and he was -deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won -the world's pity when he got into debt and the world's praise when he -got out of it, he was no sort of nine days' wonder; his country had made -him its "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in -appointing himself, as he said, "ambassador-at-large of the United -States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all -official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over "The -Innocents Abroad" and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices -to the day when the newspapers were freely proposing that he ought to -have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the -Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first -time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and -private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and -his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his -opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a -sort of incarnation of the character and quality of modern America. -"Everywhere he moved," says Mr. Paine, "a world revolved about him." In -London, in Vienna, his apartments were a court, and traffic rules were -modified to let him pass in the street. A charmed life, surely, when we -consider, in addition to this public acclaim, the tidal waves of wealth -that flowed in upon him again and again, the intense happiness of his -family relations, and the splendid recognition of those fellow-members -of his craft whose word to him was final--Kipling, who "loved to think -of the great and godlike Clemens," and Brander Matthews, who freely -compared him with the greatest writers of history, and Bernard Shaw, who -announced that America had produced just two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe -and Mark Twain. Finally, there was Mr. Howells, "the recognized critical -Court of Last Resort in this country," as he called him. Did not Mr. -Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: "Your foundations -are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, -and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"? - -The spectators of this drama could hardly have been expected to take -the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously, and all the more because he -totally refuted the old and popular notion that humorists are always -melancholy. I have already quoted the remark he made about his -temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life, four months -before his own death. It is borne out by all the evidence of all his -years. He was certainly not one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue -natures, those June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day -long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He was an August nature, -given to sudden storms and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with -electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, -and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he -was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child -in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter -where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope -preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine -temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," -he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this -footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly _happy_ -than I am I defy the world to produce him and _prove_ him." And it seems -always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in his triumphs on the -platform or indulging his "rainbow-hued impulses" on paper, we see him -again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he was -expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress assembled, -"happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in -his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: -"Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know -my temperament"? - -And his physical health was just what one might expect from this, from -his immense vitality. He was subject to bronchial colds and he had -intermittent attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his health -appears to have been as perfect as his energy was inexhaustible. "I have -been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years," he writes -in 1875; from all one gathers he might have made the same statement -twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at fifty, at -sixty, at seventy--during that extraordinary period, well within the -memory of people who are still young, when he had solved his financial -difficulties by going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine says, -"like a debutante in her first season,"--the days when people called him -"the Belle of New York": "By half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had -danced all those people down--and yet was not tired, merely breathless. -I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at -work on this letter to you." And again, the next year, his sixtieth -year, when he had been playing billiards with H.H. Rogers, until Rogers -looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you ever get tired?": "I was -able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like. Don't you -remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the -villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I -get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one -daylight nap since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testimony -of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, during the last five -years of his life when, even at seventy-four, he was still playing -billiards "9 hours a day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human -being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a -young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the -night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh -and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He -smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the -billiard-table with the light step of youth. At 3 or 4 o'clock in the -morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my -weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of -his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least -suggestion of fatigue." - -Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his intimates, had ever -in their eyes,--this darling of all the gods. No wonder they were -inclined to take his view of "the damned human race" as rather a -whimsical pose; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it so even -if they had known, generally known, that he had a way of referring in -private to "God's most elegant invention" as not only "damned" but also -"mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are always supposed to be -that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about -the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an -abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to -explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its -stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and -Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment." -All his closest friends were accustomed to little notes like this: "I -have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing -that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and -hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put -in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race." -Might not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that? - -Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's writings which only a -succeeding generation can really have, it might be possible to explain -in this objective way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism -which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The change in tone -between the poetry of the first half of "Life on the Mississippi" and -the dull notation of the latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp -Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," -with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," -that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, -along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the -reader for taking his text at its face value--all this might be -attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and -family sorrow. If he was always manifesting, in word and deed, his deep -belief that life is inevitably a process of deterioration,--well, did -not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it not, is it not, a -popular American dogma that "the baddest children are better than the -goodest men"? A race of people who feel this way could not have thought -there was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims like these: - - If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he - will not bite you. This is the principal difference between - a dog and a man. - - It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to - hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other - to get the news to you. - -They could hardly have been surprised at the bitter, yes, even the -vindictive, mockery of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," at Mark -Twain's definition of man as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted -neither "to supply the coffee nor turn the crank," at his recurring -"plan" to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the -air for a period of two minutes. - -Has not the American public, with its invincible habit of "turning -hell's back-yard into a playground," gone so far even as to discount -"The Mysterious Stranger," that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole -of cruel nonsense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank -assertion that slavery, hypocrisy and cowardice are the eternal destiny -of man? Professor Stuart P. Sherman, who likes to defend the views of -thirty years ago and sometimes seems to forget that all traditions are -not of equal validity, says of this book that it "lets one into a -temperament and character of more gravity, complexity and interest than -the surfaces indicated." But having made this discovery, for he is -openly surprised, Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and -unexpected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had known before: "What -Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in monarchies, -aristocracies, tribal religions and--minorities bent on mischief, and -making a bludgeon of the malleable many." And, after all, he says, "the -wicked world visited by the mysterious stranger is sixteenth century -Austria--not these States." But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in -reality Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through -whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations of Huck Finn and Tom -Sawyer, those characters which, as we know from a hundred evidences, -haunted Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any rate, Mark -Twain's boys, and whoever compares their moral attitude with that of the -boys of Mark Twain's prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into -his soul. "We boys wanted to warn them"--Marget and Ursula, against the -danger that was gathering about them--"but we backed down when it came -to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor -brave enough to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get us into trouble." What, is this Mark Twain speaking, the -creator of Huck and Tom, who gladly broke every law of the tribe to -protect and rescue Nigger Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly enough nor -brave enough" to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get them into trouble? Can we, in the light of this, continue to -say that Mark Twain's pessimism was due to anything so external as the -hatred of tyranny, and a sixteenth century Austrian tyranny at that? Is -it not perfectly plain that that deep contempt for man, the -"coffee-mill," a contempt that has spread now even to the boy-nature of -which Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have had some -far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate -chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not -the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no -relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist: - - Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. - - All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange - complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to - live. - - Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all - his others--his last breath. - -And that paragraph about the death of his daughter, so utterly -inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes to himself: "My life is a -bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most -precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor ---death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to -life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; -and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions, to -one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that: but at least one of -them is that, not to the writer's apprehension, but in the writer's -experience, life has been in some special way a vain affliction. - -Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of Mark Twain's -pessimism? Can we attribute it, with Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt -under which he labored now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the -death of those he loved? No, for these things would have modified his -temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, -checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of -brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own -testimony, the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever knew, he -lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of life he had neither more -nor less than other men, and they affected him neither more nor less. To -say anything else would be to contradict the whole record of his -personality. - -No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted Mark Twain, a -malady common to many Americans, perhaps, if we are to judge from that -excessive interest in therapeutics which he shared with so many millions -of his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark Twain's later -history which has received too little attention. "Whether it was -copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice," -says Mr. Paine--to approach this subject on its broadest side--"he -rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would -provide physical or mental easement for his species." And here again the -general leads to the particular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender -heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts -of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he -and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near -losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in -their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that -momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor -Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method -that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles -about it, bombarding his friends with letters of appreciation and -recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave -most of his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea for all -human ills which osteopathy could not reach." There was Christian -Science to which, in spite of his attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat -equivocal book he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and -as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest converts," who -"never lost faith in its power." And lastly, there was the "eclectic -therapeutic doctrine" which he himself put together piecemeal from all -the others, to the final riddance of _materia medica_. - -We have seen what Mark Twain's apparent health was. Can we say that this -therapeutic obsession was due to the illnesses of his family, which -were, indeed, unending? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant -stimulus to the obsession--the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine," for -instance, did, quite definitely, rise up out of the midst of them. But -it is plain that there had to be an element of "soul-cure" in these -various healings for Mark Twain to be interested in them, that what -interested him in them _was_ the "soul-cure," the "mind-cure." Can he -say too much in praise of Christian Science for its "healing of the -spirit," its gift of "buoyant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from -care"? In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental healing -began at a time when he and his family alike were free from illness. It -is in 1886, when Mark Twain was at the very, summit of his fame, when he -was the most successful publisher in the world, when he was at work on -his most ambitious book, when he was "frightened," as he said, at the -proportions of his prosperity, when his household was aglow with -happiness and well-being, that his daughter Susy notes in her diary: -"Papa has been very much interested of late in the 'mind-cure' theory." -It might be added that he was about at the age when, according to his -famous aphorism, a man who does not become a pessimist knows too little -about life. - -In fact, the more one scans the later pages of Mark Twain's history the -more one is forced to the conclusion that there was something gravely -amiss with his inner life. There was that frequently noted fear of -solitude, that dread of being alone with himself which made him, for -example, beg for just one more game of billiards at 4 o'clock in the -morning. There were those "daily self-eludings" that led him to slay his -own conscience in one of the most ferocious of his humorous tales. That -conscience of his--what was it? Why do so many of his jokes turn upon an -affectation, let us say, of moral cowardice in himself? How does it -happen that when he reads "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him "with -force" is Tito's compromise with his conscience? Why those continual -fits of remorse, those fantastic self-accusations in which he charged -himself, we are told, with having filled Mrs. Clemens's life with -privations, in which he made himself responsible first for the death of -his younger brother and later for that of his daughter Susy, writing to -his wife, according to Mr. Paine, that he was "wholly and solely -responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality -his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-fall, the -separation from Susy, and this final, incredible disaster"? Was there -any reason why, humorously or otherwise, he should have spoken of -himself as a liar, why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of -writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I went on now and took -him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in -literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"? -That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made him come to think -of literature as primarily, perhaps, the confession of sins--was there -anything in the moral point of view of his generation to justify it, in -this greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business, this zealous -reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be -cheaply persuadable" was, he said, the first command the Deity ever -issued to a human being on this planet, the only command Adam would -never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin of one of his -books: "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep -and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he -despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same reason." - -A strange enigma! "You observe," wrote Mark Twain once, almost at the -beginning of his career, "that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." That -spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The restless -movement of his life, those continual journeys to Bermuda, where "the -deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and -give his conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an -autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible," which -would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt -alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense -relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of -limitations--you have served your term, well or less well, and you are -mustered out"--how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? -For Mark Twain was right--things do not happen by chance, and the -psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain -respects that other sort of determinism in which he so almost -fanatically believed. There is no figure for the human being like the -ship, he sometimes said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his -contemporaries, just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory -of that last English welcome, the _Begum_ of Bengal, stateliest of -Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it -merely an irony of circumstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of -storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea? - -No, there was a reason for Mark Twain's pessimism, a reason for that -chagrin, that fear of solitude, that tortured conscience, those -fantastic self-accusations, that indubitable self-contempt. It is an -established fact, if I am not mistaken, that these morbid feelings of -sin, which have no evident cause, are the result of having transgressed -some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one's nature. It is as old as -Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest -that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his -was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked -personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost -wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The -spirit of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from the -bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had never quite been -able to possess. - -Does this seem too rash a hypothesis? It is, I know, the general -impression that Mark Twain quite fully effectuated himself as a writer. -Mr. Howells called him the "Lincoln of our literature," Professor -William Lyon Phelps describes him as one of the supreme novelists of the -world, Professor Brander Matthews compares him with Cervantes, and -Bernard Shaw said to him once: "I am persuaded that the future historian -of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French -historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." These were views -current in Mark Twain's lifetime, and similar views are common enough -to-day. "Mark Twain," says Professor Archibald Henderson, "enjoys the -unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening -and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual -powers from the beginning to the end." To Mr. John Macy, author of what -is, on the whole, the most discerning book that has been written on our -literature, he is "a powerful, original thinker." And finally, Mr. H.L. -Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There -was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof -engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one -associates with the great artists of the Renaissance." An imposing array -of affirmations, surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few -years, during which he has become in a way so much more interesting, -have witnessed a singular change in Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly -present he is in the public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort -of archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not -continue so to be for many generations to comet Undoubtedly. By whom, -however, with the exception of two or three of his books, is he read? -Mr. Paine, I know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this day in -America in larger quantity than any other book of travel. But a number -of explanations might be given for this, as for any other mob -phenomenon, none of which has anything to do with literary fame in the -proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by the delight and -stimulus which he gives to mature spirits in the present, and time, it -seems to me, tends to bear out the assertion of Henry James that Mark -Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry Finn," -"Tom Sawyer," a story or two like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a -sketch or two like "Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of -"Life on the Mississippi,"--these, in any case, can already be said to -have "survived" all his other work. And are these writings, however -beautiful and important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic -genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes? -Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that prevails to-day when he -called their author the "divine amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" -and "Tom Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent, as -complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality." - -So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not -been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled -almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him? When -his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, they -were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they -had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a -creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his -prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of -his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique -magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot -help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American -writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like -Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if -intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth -to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his -associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian -would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the -horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of -one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what -Mr. Howells says: "Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities -that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final -personality was something exquisite." That combination of barbaric force -and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him--is there not -about it something portentous, something that suggests the true lord of -life? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic -atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were -the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their -impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one -of the fixed stars had fallen in space. - -This was the force, this the energy which, through Mark Twain's pen, -found such inadequate expression. He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a -"divine amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called -it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way -of saying, in the latter case, that his was a mind that had not -developed, and in the former, that his was a splendid genius which had -never found itself? - -It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own self-estimate. His -judgments were, as Mr. Paine says, "always unsafe": strictly speaking, -he never knew what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the -time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against -his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark -Twain's estimate of himself it is no conscious judgment of his career -one has in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the judgment of his -unconscious self. This he revealed unawares in all sorts of ways. - -There were times when he seemed to share the complacent confidence of so -many others in his immortal fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his -large, loose, easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live a -couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a -fresh start and live the rest of the time." And Mr. Paine says that as -early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers a -contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one -hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with -his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this -must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty -confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain -was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he -did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of -megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest -rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous -episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I -wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, -I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American -writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident -in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it became a -historic event: it was for him, plainly, of an exceptional significance, -and all his love for gorgeous trappings could never account for the -delight he had in that doctor's gown--"I would dress that way all the -time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine--which became for him a permanent -robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain at seventy-two, one of the most -celebrated men in the world, could not have cared so much for it if it -had been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must have served -in some way also to vindicate him in his own eyes; he seized upon it as -a sort of talisman, as a reassurance from what he considered the highest -court of culture, that he really was one of the elect. - -Yes, that naive passion for the limelight, for "walking with kings" and -hobnobbing with job lots of celebrities, that "revelling," as Mr. Paine -calls it, "in the universal tribute"--what was its root if not a deep -sense of insecurity, a desire for approval both in his own eyes and in -the eyes of all the world? During those later years in New York, when he -had become so much the professional celebrity, he always timed his -Sunday morning walks on Fifth Avenue for about the hour when the -churches were out. Mr. Paine tells how, on the first Sunday morning, he -thoughtlessly suggested that they should turn away at Fifty-ninth Street -in order to avoid the throng and that Clemens quietly remarked, "I like -the throng." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the Plaza Hotel until -the appointed hour.... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid -the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on -which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was -lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the -multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as -the tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for approval and -corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a -quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted -his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"? -Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obsession: kings, -empresses, princes, archduchesses--what a part they play in his -biography! He is always dragging them in, into his stories, into his -letters, writing about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them, -and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals they have. And as -with kings, so also with great men, or men who were considered great, or -men who were merely notorious. He makes lists of those he has known, -those he has spent evenings with--Mark Twain, to whom celebrity was the -cheapest thing going! Is there not in all this the suggestion of an -almost conscious weakness clutching at strength, the suggestion of some -kind of failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of success? - -Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this same desire for -approval, for corroboration. Mark Twain was supported by the sentiment -of the majority, which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he had -the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the arbiter of all the -elegances; he had virtually the freedom of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and -not only its freedom but a higher rate of payment than any other -_Atlantic_ contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more -reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as -good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells -in 1887, "but I've always done what I could to secure and enlarge my -good opinion of it. I've always said to, myself, 'Everybody reads it and -that's something--it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable -people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by -implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and -fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, -high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody -likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a -note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the -sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, -beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He -rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an -uplifter of the masses; then, with a touch of mock-noble indignation, he -confesses to being a popular entertainer, fully convinced at least that -there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed -to put upon his book an explanatory line: "This is written for the -Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the Members." No plea more -grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great -reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant -of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a -separation between the "Head" and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, -had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for -the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it. - -Mark Twain, in short, knew very well--for I think these illustrations -prove it--that there was something decidedly different between himself -and a great writer. In that undifferentiated mob of celebrities, great, -and less great, and far from great, amid which he moved for a -generation, he was a favored equal. But in the intimate presence of some -isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the -candidate for the mystagogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow -writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude. Was it Browning? -He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied -for a time with the naive self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen? -Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin note-books: "Been taken -for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was -found the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses the word -"literature" in connection with his own work it is with a sudden -self-consciousness that lets one into the secret of his inner humility. -"I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever -been given a degree by any college in any age of the world, so far as I -know," he writes to the authorities of Yale in 1888. A man who freely -compared himself with the melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, -who, in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins," invited his readers, -who already knew how "the born and trained novelist works," to see how -the "jack-leg" does it, could never have been accused of not knowing his -true rank. "You and I are but sewing-machines," he says in "What Is -Man?" "We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care -nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out -Gobelins." - -I think we are in a position now to understand that boundless comic -impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic impudence which led him to propose -to Edwin Booth in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him to -telegraph to W.T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to -disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now"; which -led him, at the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum, "Why am -I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was -just asking for information." Tempting Providence, was he not, this -child of good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the fates. If -he had not had a certain sense of colossal force, it would never have -occurred to him, however humorously, to place himself on an equality -with Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the Czar and his -magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean. But, on the other hand, it -would never have occurred to him to make these comparisons if he had -felt himself in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are not -only great in energy but masters of themselves let their work speak for -them; men who are not masters of themselves, whose energy, however -great, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are -driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration -from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured -that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare -and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great -fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet -they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure -themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, -therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually -was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which -had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy -that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply -of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable -abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined -with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the -barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of -that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes -one's sole criterion the magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, -ever more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life Mark Twain -was attended by what Mr. Paine calls "psychic evidences"; he never fails -to note the marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is -always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"--he -invented the phrase; strange phenomena of nature rise up in his path. -Three times, while crossing the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each -time he takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the barbarian -conquerors of antiquity, I say, those essential opposites of the -creative spirit, whose control is altogether internal, and who feels -himself the master of his own fate, could have been more in character -than was Mark Twain when he observed, a few months before his death: "I -came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I -expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my -life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no -doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable; freaks, they came in -together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." - -A comet, this time! And a few pages back we found him comparing himself -with a sewing-machine. Which is he, one, or the other, or both? He seems -to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of -extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty -solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, -confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed -to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains. A great -genius, in short, that has never attained the inner control which makes -genius great, a mind that has not found itself, a mind that does not -know itself, a spirit that cloaks to the end in the fantasy of its -temporal power the tragic reality of its own essential miscarriage! - -We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret of Mark Twain's -mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy of that little book which he -called his "Bible," "What Is Man?" He was extremely proud of the -structure of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a machine, -"moved, directed, commanded by _exterior_ influences, _solely_," that he -is "a chameleon, who takes the color of his place of resort," that he is -"a mere coffee-mill," which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee -nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of proprietary interest and -pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he -says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving -impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--and is merely a machine and -entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly -possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in -patching and painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession -and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging -fact approaches." You see how it pleases him, how much it means to him, -that final "Truth," how he clings to it with a sort of defiant insolence -against the "imploring argument," the "damaging fact"? "Man originates -nothing," he says, "not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. -He was a machine, and machines do not create." Faith never gave the -believer more comfort than this philosophy gave Mark Twain. - -But is it possible for a creative mind to find "contentment" in denying -the possibility of creation? And why should any one find pride and -satisfaction in the belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the -denial of "free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and the sour -grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and tragic souls who find -comfort in saying that love exists nowhere in the world because they -themselves have missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark -Twain any pleasure to feel that he was "entitled to no personal merit" -for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he -felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of -feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to -achieve--namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, -"Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the -world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the -creative life is the very embodiment of it--the emergence, that is to -say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant, integrating -principle that turns the world he confronts into a mere instrument for -the registration of his own preferences. There is but one -interpretation, consequently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight -in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine: it brought him -comfort to feel that if he was, as he said, a "sewing-machine," it was -the doing of destiny, and that nothing he could have done himself would -have enabled him to "turn out Gobelins." - -From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that Mark Twain was a -frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development, and beyond this -fact, as we know from innumerable instances the psychologists have -placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of -his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even been -turned, as we shall see; against himself; the poet, the artist in him, -consequently, had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a -spiritual valetudinarian. - -But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to glance not only -at Mark Twain's life and work, but also at the epoch and the society in -which he lived. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - - "One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is - dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, - but they are essentially not happy," - - STENDHAL: _On Love in the United States_. - - -In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, -revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather -material for his book, "Life on the Mississippi." It was, naturally, a -profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what -his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an -assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot -of the steamer _Gold Dust_ recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the -pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We -got to be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most of my -time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a -big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of -the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her -most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me -there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been -no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a -pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." - -Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant, that Mark Twain -recorded in these words, a regret for the passing of time and the charm -and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his -"literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not altogether flattering -to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to -ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely "happy and -care-free" a man of Mark Twain's energy and power could hardly, in later -life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he certainly did: all his -days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a -lost paradise. "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done -in my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am a person," he -wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, "who would quit authorizing in a minute to -go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we -see; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, -that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only -by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact -that the earlier pages of "Life on the Mississippi," in which he -pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and -expressive that he ever wrote. - -It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong hankering for the -lost paradise of the pilot-house. It was something more organic, and -Mark Twain provides us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my -subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his book, "it is no -surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have -followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it." A singular -statement for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life, the -two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are nothing else than love -and pride! But Mark Twain writes those words with an almost unctuous -gravity of conviction, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a -pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had -not experienced it in literature. Strange as that may seem, we cannot -question it; we have, simply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi -pilot had, in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist in -him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in him had never been -satisfied again. We do not have to look beyond this in order to -interpret, if not the fact, at least the obsession. He felt that, in -some way, he had been as a pilot on the right track; and he felt that he -had lost this track. If he was always harking back to that moment, then, -it was, we can hardly escape feeling, with a vague hope of finding again -some scent that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious thread -of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it possible that he had, in -fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that -career? It is a bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark -Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to see first what sort -of boy he was, and what sort of society it was he grew up in; then we -shall be able to understand what unique opportunities for personal -growth the career of a pilot afforded him. - -What a social setting it was, that little world into which Mark Twain -was born! It was drab, it was tragic. In "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom -Sawyer" we see it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a -later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled in Hannibal, on -the Mississippi. He was five at the time; his eyes had opened on such a -scene as we find in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary, -discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he -says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, -desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, -wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in -some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"--it is the epic not only -of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. -How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the -scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E.H. Howe's "Story -of a Country Town," for instance, that Western counterpart in sodden -misery of "Ethan Frome"--a book which has only begun to find its public. -This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest, tells us in so -many words that in all his early days he never saw a woman who was not -anaemic and fretful, a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who -was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment. No wonder he has -come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is -no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain -himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, -dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and -foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, -some gigantic garbage-can! Human nature was not responsible for this -debris of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could human nature -rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and murder," we are told, were the -diversions of the capital city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. -It was not very different in normal times along the Mississippi. -Hannibal was a small place; yet Mr. Paine records four separate murders -which Mark Twain actually witnessed as a boy: every week he would see -some drunken ruffian run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, -he saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many gruesome -experiences," exclaims Mr. Paine, "there appear to have been in those -early days!" But let us be moderate: every one was not violent. As for -the majority of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that history -calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion, justice will never be -realistic. The gods of Greece would have gone unwashed and turned gray -at forty and lost their digestion and neglected their children if they -had been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into an irritable -silence. - -A desert of human sand!--the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, -for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions -after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his -letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a -dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities -may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of -existence inevitably droop and wither." - -Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his -mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of -Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with -John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain -"did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are -told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he -seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a -perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of -his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon -him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking -"sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. -Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent -medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals--we have it from "Tom -Sawyer"--"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were -all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, -desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, -without enough power, grating on their own metal. - -Little Sam, as every one called him, was the fifth child in this -household, "a puny baby with a wavering promise of life"; it is -suggested that he was not wanted. Mr. Paine speaks of him somewhere as -"high-strung and neurotic." We are not surprised, therefore, to find him -at three and four "a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies -that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a -series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as -he lay rolling in the grass." This is the child who is to retain through -life that exquisite sensibility of which so many observers have spoken. -"Once when I met him in the country," says Mr. Howells, for example, of -his later life, "he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in -bringing down a blackbird; and he described the poor, stricken, glossy -thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as -he might have given a wounded child." Already, in his infancy, his -gentle, winning manner and smile make him every one's favorite. A very -special little flower of life, you see, capable of such feeling that at -twenty-three his hair is to turn gray in the tragic experience of his -brother's death. A flower of life, a wild flower, and infinitely -fragile: the doctor is always being called in his behalf. Before he -grows up he is to have prophetic dreams, but now another neurotic -symptom manifests itself. In times of family crisis, at four, when one -of his sisters is dying, at twelve, after the death of his father, he -walks in his sleep: often the rest of the household get up in the middle -of the night to find this delicate little waif with his eyes shut -"fretting with cold in some dark corner." - -Can we not already see in this child the born, predestined artist? And -what sort of nurture will his imagination have? He is abandoned to the -fervid influences of the negro slaves,--for his father had moments of a -relative prosperity. Crouching in their cabins, he drinks in wild, weird -tales of blood-curdling African witchcraft. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, -"an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination -of a delicate child." One thinks indeed of an image that would have -pleased Heine, the image of a frail snow-plant of the North quivering, -flaming in the furnace of the jungle. Mark Twain appears to have been -from the outset a center of interest, radiating a singular potency; and -the more his spirit was subjected to such a fearful stimulus the more -urgently he required for his normal development the calm, clairvoyant -guidance a pioneer child could never have had. The negroes were "in real -charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment." What other -influence was there to counter-balance this? - -One, and one only, an influence tragic in its ultimate consequences, the -influence of Mark Twain's mother. That poor, taciturn, sunstruck -failure, John Clemens, was a mere pathetic shadow beside the woman whose -portrait Mark Twain has drawn for us in the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer." -She who was regarded as a "character" by all the town, who was said to -have been "the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best -dancer, in all Kentucky," who was still able to dance at 80, and lived -to be 87, who belonged, in short, to "the long-lived, energetic side of -the house," directed her children, we are told--and we can believe -it--"with considerable firmness." And what was the inevitable -relationship between her and this little boy? "She had a weakness," says -Mr. Paine, "for the child that demanded most of her mother's care.... -All were tractable and growing in grace but little Sam ... a delicate -little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed." In -later life, "you gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she told -him. In fact, she was always scolding him, comforting him, forgiving -him, punishing and pleading with him, fixing her attention upon him, -exercising her emotions about him, impressing it upon his mind for all -time, as we shall come to see that woman is the inevitable seat of -authority and the fount of wisdom. - -We know that such excessive influences are apt to deflect the growth of -any spirit. Men are like planets in this, that for them to sail clear in -their own orbits the forces of gravity have to be disposed with a -certain balance on all sides: how often, when the father counts for -nothing, a child becomes the satellite of its mother, especially when -that mother's love has not found its normal expression in her own youth! -We have seen that Mark Twain's mother did not love her husband; that her -capacity for love, however, was very great is proved by the singular -story revealed in one of Mark Twain's letters: more than sixty years -after she had quarreled with that young Lexington doctor, and when her -husband had long been dead, she, a woman of eighty or more, took a -railway journey to a distant city where there was an Old Settlers' -convention because among the names of those who were to attend it she -had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. "Who could have imagined -such a heart-break as that?" said Mr. Howells, when he heard the story. -"Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no -more noise than a grave under foot." It made no noise, but it -undoubtedly had a prodigious effect upon Mark Twain's life. When an -affection as intense as that is balked in its direct path and repressed -it usually, as we know, finds an indirect outlet; and it is plain that -the woman as well as the mother expressed itself in the passionate -attachment of Jane Clemens to her son. We shall note many consequences -of this fact as we go on with our story. We can say at least at this -point that Mark Twain was, quite definitely, in his mother's -leading-strings. - -What was the inevitable result? I have said, not, I hope, with too much -presumption, that Mark Twain had already shown himself the born, -predestined artist, that his whole nature manifested what is called a -tendency toward the creative life. For that tendency to become -conscious, to become purposive, two things were necessary: it must be -able, in the first place, to assert itself and in the second place to -embody itself in a vocation; to realize itself and then to educate -itself, to realize itself in educating itself. And, as we know, the -influences of early childhood are, in these matters, vitally important. -If Jane Clemens had been a woman of wide experience and independent -mind, in proportion to the strength of her character, Mark Twain's -career might have been wholly different. Had she been catholic in her -sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no matter how more than -maternal her attachment to her son was, she might have placed before him -and encouraged him to pursue interests and activities amid which he -could eventually have recovered his balance, reduced the filial bond to -its normal measure and stood on his own feet. But that is to wish for a -type of woman our old pioneer society could never have produced. We are -told that the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer" is a speaking portrait of Jane -Clemens, and Aunt Polly, as we know, was the symbol of all the taboos. -The stronger her will was, the more comprehensive were her repressions, -the more certainly she became the inflexible guardian of tradition in a -social regime where tradition was inalterably opposed to every sort of -personal deviation from the accepted type. "In their remoteness from -'the political centers of the young Republic," says Mr. Howells, in "The -Leatherwood God," of these old Middle Western settlements, "they seldom -spoke of the civic; questions stirring the towns of the East; the -commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were; -unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest." And in the slave -States it was not the abolitionist alone whose name was held, as Mr. -Paine says, "in horror," but every one who had the audacity to think -differently from his neighbors. Jane Clemens, in short, was the -embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism which had proved -so favorable to the life of enterprising action but which perceived the -scent of the devil in any least expression of what is now known as the -creative impulse. She had a kind heart, she was always repenting and -softening and forgiving; it is said that whenever she had to drown -kittens, she warmed the water first. But this, without opening any -channel in a contrary direction, only sealed her authority! She won her -points as much by kindness as by law. Besides, tradition spoke first in -her mind; her hand was quicker than her heart; in action she was the -madonna of the hairbrush. And what, specifically, was it that she -punished? Those furtive dealings of Huck and Tom with whitewash and -piracy were nothing in the world--and that is why all the world loves -them--but the first stirrings of the normal aesthetic sense, the first -stirrings of individuality. - -Already I think we divine what was bound to happen in the soul of Mark -Twain. The story of "Huckleberry Finn" turns, as we remember, upon a -conflict: "the author," says Mr. Paine, "makes Huck's struggle a -psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and -sympathy on the other." In the famous episode of Nigger Jim, "sympathy," -the cause of individual freedom, wins. Years later, in "The Mysterious -Stranger," Mark Twain presented the parallel situation we noted in the -last chapter: "we found," says the boy who tells that story, "that we -were not manly enough, nor brave enough to do a generous action when -there was a chance that it could get us into trouble." Conscience and -the law, we see, had long since prevailed in the spirit of Mark Twain, -but what is the conscience of a boy who checks a humane impulse but "boy -terror," as Mr. Paine calls it, an instinctive fear of custom, of tribal -authority? The conflict in "Huckleberry Finn" is simply the conflict of -Mark Twain's own childhood. He solved it successfully, he fulfilled his -desire, in the book, as an author can. In actual life he did not solve -it at all; he surrendered. - -Turn to the record in Mr. Paine's biography. We find Mark Twain in -perpetual revolt against all those institutions for which his mother -stood. "Church ain't worth shucks," says Tom Sawyer. As for school, "he -never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and -remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything -resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of -liberty." One recalls what Huck said of Aunt Polly just before he made -his escape to the woods: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she - won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air get through 'em somehow, and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - -But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally or in any other -way. He never even imagined that his feelings of revolt had any -justification. We remember how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some -escapade, they would resolve to "lead a better life" to go to church, -visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and subsist wholly upon -tracts. That was what Mark Twain did: "not to do so," says, Mr. Paine, -"was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were -heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that." -And his mother was so strong, so courageous, the only strong and -courageous influence he knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he -set them down"--the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and -beaten and sold--"as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a -taste for a better life." Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence -himself, not to play with freedom! "He felt that it was his own -conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's -idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions." Naturally! And -she "punished him and pleaded with him, alternately"--with one -inevitable result. "'To fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote -to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly described that old feeling which -I used to have"; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a -preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be -damned." Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and -preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had -become in his eyes the "bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to -mention the creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"? - -Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and -flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. -Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other -traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities--how can we compare -the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, -horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell -of his infancy and find a vocation there? Calvinism itself had gone to -seed: it was nothing but the dead hand of custom; the flaming priest had -long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he -could find nowhere, either in men or in books, the bread and wine of the -spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, -Frank Burrough, who had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is -record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named -Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincinnati. "They were long fermenting -discourses," Mr. Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to -that winter in Macfarlane's room." And what was the counsel which, from -that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received?--that "man's -heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only -animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness" and that his -intellect was only a "depraving addition to him which, in the end, -placed him in a rank far below the other beasts." Propitious words for -this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with -books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is a memorable picture of the -library in the typical gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to -New Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering," "Affection's -Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa," "Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's -Book," "piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an -inherited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the cultural -background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh -stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the -foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark -Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, -which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half -a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. -"It gave him his cue," says Mr. Paine, "the first word of a part in the -human drama," and he conceived a sudden interest in history and -languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the -least protection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of -fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke. - -In all his environment, then, we see, there was nothing to assist in the -transformation of an unconscious artistic instinct, however urgent, into -a conscious artistic purpose. "Dahomey," wrote Mark Twain once, "could -not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. -Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not -itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of -stimulating exterior circumstances." He was reciting his own story in -those words. But the circumstances that surrounded Mark Twain were not -merely passively unfavorable to his own self-discovery; they were -actively, overwhelmingly unfavorable. He was in his mother's -leading-strings, and in his mother's eyes any sort of personal -self-assertion in choices, preferences, impulses was, literally, sinful. -Thus the whole weight of the Calvinistic tradition was concentrated -against him at his most vulnerable point. His mother, whom he could not -gainsay, was unconsciously but inflexibly set against his genius; and -destiny, which always fights on the side of the heaviest artillery, -delivered, in his twelfth year, a stroke that sealed her victory. - -Mark Twain's father died. Let Mr. Paine picture the scene: - -"The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with -him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, -indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred -things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the -knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother -took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. 'It -is all right, Sammy,' she said. 'What's done is done, and it does not -matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to -promise me----.' He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung -himself into her arms. 'I will promise anything,' he sobbed, 'if you -won't make me go to school! Anything!' His mother held him for a moment, -thinking, then she said: 'No, Sammy, you need not go to school any more. -Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.' So -he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like -his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and -justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious -matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held -sacred. That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to -somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping -together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous -at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, -they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid -on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A -thought struck Mrs. Clemens: 'Sam!' she said. He answered, but he was -sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet -around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in -succession after that. Then he slept more soundly." - -Who is sufficiently the master of signs and portents to read this -terrible episode aright? One thing, however, we feel with irresistible -certitude, that Mark Twain's fate was once for all decided there. That -hour by his father's corpse, that solemn oath, that walking in his -sleep--we must hazard some interpretation of it all, and I think we are -justified in hazarding as most likely that which explains the most -numerous and the most significant phenomena of his later life. - -To a hypersensitive child such as Mark Twain was at eleven that -ceremonious confrontation with his father's corpse must, in the first -place, have brought a profound nervous shock. Already, we are told, he -was "broken down" by his father's death; remorse had "laid a heavy hand -on him." But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? -"A hundred things in themselves trifling," which had offended, in -reality, not his father's heart but his father's will as a conventional -citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. -Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings out of this moody child, the -first wavering steps of the soul, that is what they have really been, -these peccadillos, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings -of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed; all those -crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, -are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of -that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, -with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meager traditions. -He is to go forth the Good Boy by _force majeure_, he is to become such -a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his -father's failure, to recover the lost gentility of a family that had -once been proud, to realize that "mirage of wealth" that had ever hung -before his father's eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly -with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to -remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and -all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any -fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away -childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always -a child, your mother's child! In a day to come you will write to one of -your friends, "We have no _real_ morals, but only artificial -ones--morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural -and healthy instincts." Never mind that now; your mother imagines her -heart is in the balance--will you break it?... Will you promise?... And -the little boy, in the terror of that presence, sobs: "Anything!" - -"There is in every man," said Sainte-Beuve, "a poet who dies young." In -truth, the poet does not die; he falls into a fitful trance. It is -perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment: he became, -and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism is the proof of it, a -dual personality. If I were sufficiently hardy, as I am not, I should -say that that little sleep-walker who appeared at Jane Clemens's bedside -on the night of her husband's funeral was the spirit of Tom Sawyer, come -to demand again the possession of his own soul, to revoke that ruthless -promise he had given. He came for several nights, and then, we are told, -the little boy slept more soundly, a sign, one might say, if one were a -fortune-teller, that he had grown accustomed to the new and difficult -role of being two people at once! The subject of dual personality was -always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to -his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, -susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown -from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation -of consciousness. His "wish" to be an artist, which has been so frowned -upon and has encountered such an insurmountable obstacle in the -disapproval of his mother, is now repressed, more or less definitely, -and another wish, that of winning approval, which inclines him to -conform with public opinion, has supplanted it. The individual, in -short, has given way to the type. The struggle between these two selves, -these two tendencies, these two wishes or groups of wishes, will -continue throughout Mark Twain's life, and the poet, the artist, the -individual, will make a brave effort to survive. From the death of his -father onward, however, his will is definitely enlisted on the side -opposed to his essential instinct. - -When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on his first excursion -into the great world, he gladly takes the oath, which his mother -administers, "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is -away, an oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do what -seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has -become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey -of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. -Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record -shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was -twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East -as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter journey lasted -more than a year; one might have expected it to open before him an -immense horizon; yet he seems, to judge from his published letters to -have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts or feelings of -youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of aspiration, of hope, depression, -joy, even ambition! His letters are as full of statistics as the -travel-reports of an engineer, and the only sensation he seems to -experience is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no wish -to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He is, in fact, under a -spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits himself, even from seeking on his -own account that vital experience which is the stuff of the creative -life. - -Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He hears "the old call of -the river." He becomes a pilot. - -Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon -this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the -world was to know later--"dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to -details"--should ever have persisted in acquiring the "absolutely -limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that -Mark Twain "loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and -not only the river, but a steamboat; and still more, perhaps, the -freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine omits one -important particular. We have seen that in Mark Twain two opposed groups -of wishes--the wish to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's -approval, to stand in with pioneer society--were struggling for -survival. When we turn to his account of the Mississippi pilots, their -life, their activities, their social position, we can see that in this -career both these wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in -the first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative occupation; -besides this, of all the pioneer types of the Mississippi region, the -pilot alone embodied in any large measure the characteristics of the -artist: in him alone these characteristics were permitted, in him they -were actually encouraged, to survive. - -We cannot understand why this was so without bearing in mind a -peculiarity of the pioneer regime upon which we shall have occasion more -than once to dwell. Mr. Herbert Croly has described it in "The Promise -of American Life." "In such a society," says Mr. Croly, "a man who -persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting -standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His -finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than -did the current careless and hasty product and his higher standards and -peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of -his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which -naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and -uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that -the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a -special vocation and high standards of achievement. Such a man did -insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under -the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value. -Consequently, they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with -special vocations." - -Here, of course, we have what is by far the most important fact to be -considered in any study of the creative life in the West; as we shall -see, Mark Twain remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own -view of the "special vocation" of literature. What is to be noted now is -that the pilot was an exception, and the only exception in the -Mississippi region, to this general social law. In Nevada, in -California, where Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin -his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system described by Mr. -Croly reigned in its most extreme and uncompromising form; every one had -to be a jack-of-all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The -entire welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the -Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before the war, upon -the expert skill of the pilot; for the river traffic to be secure at -all, he alone, but he at least, had to be a craftsman, a specialist of -the very highest order. There were no signal-lights along the shore, we -are told; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars; the pilot -had to know every bank and dead tree and reef, every cut-off and -current, every depth of water, by day and by night, in the whole stretch -of twelve hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he had to -"smell danger in the dark and read the surface of the water as an open -page." Upon his mastery of that "supreme science," as it was called, -hung all the civilization of the river folk, their trade, their -intercourse with the great centers, everything that stirred them out of -the inevitable stagnation of an isolated village existence. The pilot -was, consequently, in every sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a -"sovereign." Not only did he receive commands from nobody but he was -authorized to resent even the merest suggestion. "I have seen a boy of -eighteen," Mark Twain tells us, "taking a great steamer serenely into -what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing -mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere." Pilots -were, he says, "treated with marked deference by all, officers and -servants and passengers," and he adds naively: "I think pilots were -about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, -embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes." Above all, -and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of -experience in American society, recurs with most significant emphasis, -the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that -highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole -condition without which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. -"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the -only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the -earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people -... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... writers of all kinds are -manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but -then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and -child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day -I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." - -Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a -sort of channel for all the aesthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? -"When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent -ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a -steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were -only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and -material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: -repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for -a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can -hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, -to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating -enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean--first rate, for once! not -second, or third, or fourth--light and bright and gay, radiating a sort -of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, -its trim vigor. And what an air they had of _going_ somewhere, of -_getting_ somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit -of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! -Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of -mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And -the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any -menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and -their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the -fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great -master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that -of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural -passion of the novice lavished, for love of the _metier_, upon the only -creative--shall I say?--at least the only purposive figure in all his -experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the -Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It -was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. -"You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. -I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, -kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what -couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric -magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the -visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the -United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is -unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure aesthetic emotion, produced by a -supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship. - -Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said -in later life, when he used to assert so passionately that man is a mere -chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of -his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and -dictatorship of Circumstance.... Then Circumstance arrived with another -turning-point of my life--a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of -a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became -a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and -out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many -other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other assertion that to -be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts -had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and -respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct -to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited -an enthusiastic interest in craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a -neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;" -"he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required -intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those -printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, -therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the -training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark -Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted -to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to -submit to at any later period of his life. - -In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful -compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his -apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his -apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five -hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his -tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, -unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, -how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": -"even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," -says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament -could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is -to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a -career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, -initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum -all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, -"and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, -if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and -worship it! I want a man to--I want _you_ to--take up a line of action, -and _follow_ it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain -who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man -in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the -book, "I guess this is where our line starts"? - -Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that -shiftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for -dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of -his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, -if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, -meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of -existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing -with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to -have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I -used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things -got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can -trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and -another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, -who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing -down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. -Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the -life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to -study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. -Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books -and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots," -says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, -travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an -education as well as an entertainment to know." - -Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life" -is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was--as -it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you -were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the -world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside -from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and -straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of -some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates -what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle -or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, -application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, -determined spirit." - -It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile sentiment: it is -the emotion of a man who feels himself in the center of the road of his -own destiny. - - - - -CHAPTER III - -THE GILDED AGE - - - "The American democracy follows its ascending march, - uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as - the decrees of eternity." - - GEORGE BANCROFT. - - -You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, -feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim -labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an -artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent -nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp -schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted -with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in -fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in -fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, -for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river." - -Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him -for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as -the streets of London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia -served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will -it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great -writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound -personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the -mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread -in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind -with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits -of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, -he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has -his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circumstance -steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost. - -The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever -to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's -career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative -education, came to an abrupt end. - -Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change -instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to -him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that -exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in -the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that -he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a -military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The -whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with -which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it -does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility, -in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of -twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river -"sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and -purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that -amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and -there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on -the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had -thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and -'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark -Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the -characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile -frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over -his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was -fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a -little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become -organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would -never, in later years, have been led to assert so passionately that man -is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of -self-determination, was so new to this man who had passed his whole -adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent, -chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, -that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back -into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the -one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four -years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship: nothing -stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation. - -A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing -himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the -Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of -the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and -follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book -eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with -a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in -his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and -after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and -scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a -contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have -struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; -that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who -could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution -his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly -yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he -is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the -compulsions of his childhood. - - * * * * * - -But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall -have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about -[the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was -Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance -now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of -his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself. - -What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the -midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties -and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the -beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an -indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the -war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, -as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when -presidents were business men and generals were business men and -preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the -American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of -the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was -virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career -of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was -certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested -public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. -Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he -was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his -Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole -field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I -fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest -field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, -by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his -epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can -see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, -science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I -would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to -have accumulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was -offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into -the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to -burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the -John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than -be Historian or General or President." - -Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have -offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that -of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one -channel passed all the religious fervor of the race. - -I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, -artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works -often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a -story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called -the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love -with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to -make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes -West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and -again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had -made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the -tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would -strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it -then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to -him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was -all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he -persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or -four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I -_must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip -fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am -conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I -will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with -fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when -the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! -"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of -consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were -all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a -golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid -wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and -the Gilded Age is justified in its children. - -Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our -civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the -stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national -epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of -money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious -character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify -that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure -in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of -discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" -consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long -for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence -to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for -it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of -"another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the -mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious -zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in -the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor -of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are -repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has -become the prophet. - -We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to -Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit -of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration -of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and -Letters of John Hay": - - That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on - your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a - judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your - improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not - be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This - summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not - pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The - property you own--be it a tiny cottage or a palace--means so - much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up - whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an - attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization. - -Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances -that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are -the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not -by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in -material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up" -with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, -of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and -most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that -can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the -history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, -and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of -letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the -will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he -was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers -and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the -imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, -therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence -upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own -normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal -culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: -"Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor -and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with -occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the -bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here -one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality -of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything -was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in -his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very -disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be -acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and -notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be -tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he -not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, -and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, -debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what -is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, -for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the -other stars. - -We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we -realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War -were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought -were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, -in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity -of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the -West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success, -that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit -of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have -survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they -would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it -they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they -encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of -adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was -not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the -possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay -before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and -the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up -some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great -rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a -race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through -private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the -group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American -nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation -to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady -welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also -serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests -were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult. - -It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute homogeneity of -feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous folk before the Civil War and the -practical effect of pioneering and the business regime was to keep us -so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the -homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated -it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The -effect of business upon the individual has never been better described -than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I have known, and known -tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men--'big' financially--men -famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do -not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to -meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them -associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A -set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially -unattractive and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has -explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is -as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a -system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his -individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is -determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby -usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or -any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men -are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have -a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities -are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value -of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such -is the result of the business process, and the success of the process -required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually -automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality -significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has -drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the -collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the -collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than -the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere -assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is -called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality, -the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical, -realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly -says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the -man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact, -one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs -and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd. - -For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that -were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to -romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in -feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out -their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the -hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as -one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the -pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed? -Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform -dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an -anaesthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, -without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their -enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for -themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One -recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual -motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its -inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that -buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him -wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated -with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction -between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of -the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the -Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and -half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy -clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a -feudal castle, his wife is a chateleine, his children the baron's cubs, -and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the -broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable -blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the -promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of -his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him -the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the -material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason -and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of -reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these -illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the -story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim -Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to -whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends -used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green -plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums, -"California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one -eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had -to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting, -aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding -sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, -boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the -others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided -him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, -and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the -luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the -romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same -over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names -as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that -made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious -pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to -"boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain -parts of the West. - -Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would -not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the -country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of -criticism, in fact, was regarded as _lese-majeste_ to the folk-spirit of -America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell -the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and -reputation. Who does not remember the story of Dickens's connection -with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil -Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less -attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an -agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and -defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded -as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no -intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong -emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad -and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was -regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was -obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of -actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, -becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant -than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge -Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' -Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll," -says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in -society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, -and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own -notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short, -entitled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary, -that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves -superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If -you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of -your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and -warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent. - -As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America -against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in -England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating -forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse -of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic -prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and -humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name -of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic -industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of -the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins -and the Morrises--in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly -untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar -destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the -state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of -1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While -the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined -place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and -fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, -and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed -that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism -they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were -the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to -victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant." - -Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, -even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the -individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the -human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil -War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or -less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the -rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, -had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were -stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a -natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, -had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories. - -In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the -gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those -days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand _young_ -men--not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, -muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and -royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and -magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious -ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans--none but -erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was -a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths -stayed at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers." -Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature -itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and -calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of -the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order -to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening -space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not -to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the -future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who -were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the -towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of -story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the -life of this New England countryside during the generation that -followed--those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants -of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population -only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What -a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!--a -civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death. -Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation -as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those -manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the -generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole -spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a -neurotic anaemia in which it has remained so largely to this day. - -This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of -its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the -unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the -fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. -Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper -in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it -was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them -high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they -were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure -shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, -just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's -unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the -winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an -extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the -less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had -gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had -not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed -them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like -Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in -Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the -stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American -past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the -conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was -not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright -light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left -behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men -westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and -the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her -complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had -become the pacemaker in the arts. - -One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new -regime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England -that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to -carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien -editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, was consecrated to the high priesthood -by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, -already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly -appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a -young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he -resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life--an -incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his -prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own -unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America -anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. -His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an -essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his -superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed -him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative -reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all -masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured -point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate -any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his -position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what -Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, -from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and -submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and -formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide -the notion of the artist's role through which he had found his own -salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the -religious, moral and social taboos of the time. - -I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy -actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now -that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply -played into the hands of the business regime? The taboos of the one -supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of -both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring -as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, -disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the -fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled -Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who -possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what -necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that -drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during -the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against -the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, -that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry -Adams his novel, "Democracy." - -With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these -men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, -motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding -type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong -assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon -which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of -literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist -and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who -are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and -disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American -minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of -William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad -crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate -minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of -glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing -materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see -from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, -these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by -theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers -who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age -that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop -to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form. - -Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: -no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; -there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, -for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing -eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping -with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes -that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything -essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, -admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he -mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a -belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism -of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural -possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely -upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does -not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of -life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his -eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism -of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic -dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play -in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of -decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, -of inarticulate misery--read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of -the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other -nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or -next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would -have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch -without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing -upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna -of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, -moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain -hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had -forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the -welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's -"manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of -pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the -disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a -certain beautiful residuum of truth. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -IN THE CRUCIBLE - - - "The American proposes to realize his individuality freely - and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and - free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly - consenting that some other person, better qualified or more - competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when - he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to - will." - - GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: _The People of Action_. - - -Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the -gold-fields of Nevada--the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one -that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded -Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the -woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about -a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good -time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a -child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him -out for destruction. - -Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confreres of -the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of -history, travels, literature and the sciences--a young man whom it was -an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says -Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, -indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as -one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a -certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from -the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of -barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and -dandy--in fancy percales and patent leathers--in white duck and striped -shirts--he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch -hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of -the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in -dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further -than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable -surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And -whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his -utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life -as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing -vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't -suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier -frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching -thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half -the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the -indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of -development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him -had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had -been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. -He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment. - -Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true -of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of -previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common -fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the -gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it -was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were -transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion -of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing -It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of -the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there -as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the -'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever -produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves -were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other -vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost -fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes -that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in -every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military -companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, -'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, -civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey -mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and -station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. -The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock -lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North -to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development." - -This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly -opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark -Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he -might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing -spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark -Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, -far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make -terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such -a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make -money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family--that old pledge was -fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his -failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own. -Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was -the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally -enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great -triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered -it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were -gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to -exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing -what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, -more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the -river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his -father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had -become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother -Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of -success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the -position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say, -compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not -fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for -him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine -once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make -good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also -become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his -Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look -upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or -revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man. - -What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself? -A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of -inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the -indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had -obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was -indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was -tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held -absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the -rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who -submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher -standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the -easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." -Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative -instinct, therefore--and he was anything but fully aware of them--he -could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his -craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to -acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of -sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--all -those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct--were, from -the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely -in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken -down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the -tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in -them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his -own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly -organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of -torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe, -which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering -words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks -of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was -always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous -hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it -our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He -was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality -was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a -day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were -incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who -was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated -at first, he always yielded in the end. - -Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive -instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was -stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one -could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one -afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying -'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would -come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he -would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going -after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all -their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around -to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next -forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual -facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself -strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as -twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a -foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest -a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand -in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you -that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had -to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not -merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his -level best to become a millionaire. - -It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain -failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth -a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with -exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he -failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new -work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. -Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment--these were the -qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life -had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of -his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in -spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not -fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He -went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied -me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. -"The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, -"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their -movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and -suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom -humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are -likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the -flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense -anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other -extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up -everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his -comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to -the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to -bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a -critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed -simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to -succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and -yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly -anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark -Twain's business life. - -So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious -desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of -individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in -the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted -him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the -necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American -writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain -solved by becoming a humorist. - -Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's -soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more -than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of -his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he -would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off -"alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely -from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at -all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his -surroundings"--wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would -hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything -else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to -establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the -fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." -"He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner -who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a -camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!--all the -contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's -fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to -succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in -himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives -in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted -to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any -one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up -hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary -paper in Virginia City; hell!" - -Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary -pretensions called the _Enterprise_, which was edited and written by a -group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was -to the _Enterprise_ that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and -at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he -presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with -profound reluctance. - -Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born -writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any -opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a -life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have -gravitated toward such people as the _Enterprise_ group: that he did so -is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But -committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a -different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky -journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the -pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a -good time," says Mr. Paine. "The _Enterprise_, 'Comstock to the -backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain -could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself -with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, -as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" -says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as -a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he -fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when -"the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all -hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding -himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile -walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," -says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he -came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How -different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his -piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked -forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an -inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself -and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a -capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a -hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the _Enterprise_ office worn and -travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard -leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about -one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he -added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It -was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to -claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is -something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that -suggests not an acclamation but a surrender? - -Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the -_Enterprise_ Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He -attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to -me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to -break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the -surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." -No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more -or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on -the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was -relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune -that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were -plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him -reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself -so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to -excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, -and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this -opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must -consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but -the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the -creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but -actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the -_Enterprise_ mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he -had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, -and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of -a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by -the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was -this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens -the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark -Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the _Enterprise_ -was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate -that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, -the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if -he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would -prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any -other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For -him, therefore, the opportunity of the _Enterprise_ meant an obligation -to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he -wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would -not have displayed such reluctance in joining the _Enterprise_, and the -fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a -humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling -his own soul. - -Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come -to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. -But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his -amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading -together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his -triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and -said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself--I am allowing -myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any -longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied -himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to -choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not -only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many -instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a role which he -apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate -all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it. - -But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. -Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer -rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the -mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new -title"--the pen-name he had adopted--"and its success." He knew that his -severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, -worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he -was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a -rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that -promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the -mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately -proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his -new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we -actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to -telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That -he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that -he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a -commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: -"His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," -says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not -with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was -necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a -good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the -_nom de plume_ was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, -crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations -in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted -a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his -merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the -time--in pioneer circles, especially, observe--simply argues that all -the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a -form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own -persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting -coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe -water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in -Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought -of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which -he was proud only because it paid. - -It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he -had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone -astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was -intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was -desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the -evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been -here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We -are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find -with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again." -Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is -certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is -crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his -journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No--not -home again--in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The -city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business -anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had -become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had -been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a -loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the -trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New -York as he is about to start on the _Quaker City_ excursion which is to -result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two -letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of -his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he -says: "I am wild with impatience to move--move--_move_!... Curse the -endless delays! They always kill me--they make me neglect every duty and -then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never -had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am -so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish -anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored -full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an -accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless -moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly -unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his -family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the -most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself -to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, -transgressed his principle of growth? - -One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in -New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it -was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in -the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. -Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while -for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a -lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought -disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus -Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it -as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he -believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written -January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what -to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up -and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save -piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be -excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single -out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and -His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to -please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed -that he had not even offered it to _The Californian_, the magazine to -which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard -it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter -prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he -has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other -hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for -it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate -him, this poor, ingenuous being!--this divided soul who has never been -able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows -no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his -own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping -Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone -rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary -edifice." - -So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted -this role unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic -self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying -that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative -instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive -instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that -instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by -public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine, -"was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that -never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings -of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been -to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even, -constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler -calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order -to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak -child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal -life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his -companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled -in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular. -United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make -money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it -received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected, -repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb -and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest. - -Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights -of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets. -Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes -of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to -laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered -a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the -mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his -improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect." -He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a -bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The -Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some -degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute -accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the _Quaker City_ he -found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry -Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to -follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second -book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and -intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides -this, it brought him the recognition of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It -brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the -postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a -choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be -disposed to accept--"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a -Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's -appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It -brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, -assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London--mine being -(between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was -received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the -long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least -one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on -any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in -gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when -one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite -actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred -against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." -Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which -he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset -his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in -Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go -home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic -conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient -in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had -made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had -pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in -America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored -regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely -overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most. - -It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James -Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in -their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a -humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing -that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be -something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they -found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant -something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of -culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal -visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but -to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only -ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been -a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent -barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the -presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen -applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a -dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do -it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to -his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being -gulled, and partly because he wasn't--because the beautiful force of -his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, -because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, -are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with -slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was -not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was -being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, -by the people who really _knew_, whose judgment could really be trusted. -Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply -countersigning the verdict of America. - -For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain -men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have -seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation -into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment -when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business -agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about -this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But -the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America -played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over -to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward--these -must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a -diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was -not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything -less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all -their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made. - -It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus -Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada -world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are -told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps -with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too -could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's -counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit -with possibilities of inner growth before him--what could Artemus Ward -have known about such things?--but as an embryonic institution, so to -speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself -and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he -ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was -subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," -said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement -of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and -character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with -inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had -been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we -look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les -Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for -knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can -we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not -withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, -had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not -already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America -capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said -to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least -resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your -mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend--into life -and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and -"extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never -forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he -acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and -refined party" of the _Quaker City_ excursion which led him to the feet -of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward -Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread -and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," -said he--Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now -here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to -deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than -enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do -it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him -how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his -percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in -the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were -the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men -of statecraft, literature and divinity. - -Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance -of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner -peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him -committed to the pursuit of worldly success. - -That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a -creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. -He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral -infantility. We know that the role of laugh-maker had, from early -adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in -Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers -laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud -and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, -where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his -audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, -he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in -public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had -returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held -so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That -persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to -a _metier_ in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of -craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It -was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least -resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was -falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied -that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the -artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a -journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance. - -Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he -wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have -doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, -except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." -To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success -of his book--a success the like of which had scarcely been known in -America--Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a -journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and -editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the -rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer -with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that -Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's -fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest -point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had -temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now -again literature had dropped into the background, had become an -avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial -interests!--there were whole years during which he thought of hardly -anything else. - -This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, -with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic -attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to -"follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a -series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage -of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the -same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of -adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was -this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered -by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the -success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other -autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige -machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning -to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary -life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the -boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a -peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other -phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various roles he has -played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or -education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I -ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that -under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the -reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really -experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all -different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the -artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an -infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he -tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and -again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There -was nothing new in that story"--"The American Claimant"--"but the -finger-prints in this one is virgin ground--absolutely _fresh_, and -mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied -a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded -to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public -wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with -what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"--the -possibilities of this, the possibilities of that--in the commercial, not -in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the -promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with -its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, -in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series -that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not -as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally -conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his -life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot -and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant -of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naively, -"but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a -thing as an artist had never existed. - -Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark -Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his -agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, -Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain -hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is -reputation anyway--money is secondary." So he floods the house with -complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he -says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune -didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and -your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the -country." It was true. But in that moment--that typical moment, in that -reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's -die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with -generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to -walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes -to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a -formidable spirit, that _alter ego_ within him,--he is going to hear its -bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: -his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the -dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned -over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished -to secure a government appointment for Orion." - -Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable -sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says--with an emphasis of his -own--he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. -From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called -adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence -without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" -now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments." - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - - - "Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as - bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride." - - IBSEN: _The Comedy of Love_. - - -The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, -consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead -himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and -still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most -consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own -way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy -calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what -Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, -of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so -little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in -America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: -"in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious -things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to -practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon -one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the -bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. -No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of -industry. - -Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he -put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light -are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if -Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the -children of light he would have been perfectly free--to starve and to -shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its -moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he -could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the -recognized American game according to the recognized American rules. - -Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct -of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just -because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks -of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that -people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling -them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the -lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a -personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his -environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear -for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the -most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without -foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. -Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he -wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, -to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left -vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished -him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he -met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make -good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew -the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in -prestige, stood to him _in loco parentis_; and, to complete the ironic -circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a -Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them -he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. -Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody." - -The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later -years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we -are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser -Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit -heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions -that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the -will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus -Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what -they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret -Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently -until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to -a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in -the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above -all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first -moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary -affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature -and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean -Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The -Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the -woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom -with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual -rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by -his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the -self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go -his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always -been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve -it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S. -McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself. - -In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to -the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the -prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a -contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the -community to which money is the primary condition and the primary -instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew -Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged -to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the -spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an -expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a -young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued -now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And -meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social -inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish -manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness--everything that made -foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that -would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to -consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of -a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of -bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had -ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had -become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of -humor was a gold-mine--so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently -cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He -was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he -wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot -properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we -realize that he had been manoeuvered into the role of a candidate for -gentility. - -But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had -been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his -creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead -father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his -mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man, -in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take -precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been -the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the -days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he -was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go -back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure -as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained -precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time, -we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever--proud (even if somewhat, -critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had -been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, -scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In -turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the -same Sam, and always would be--a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true -that Mark Twain, _who_ required authority as much as he required -affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who -would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be -mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at -least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and -afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the _Quaker -City_ party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and -character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed -my buttons on," he wrote--he was thirty-two at the time--"kept my -clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), -lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only -natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife -"implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his -subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, -"she edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my -works--she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the -totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia -Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death -Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her. -Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about -him?--"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was, -I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken -the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place. -Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara -Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the -billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."--a sign that was -always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been -called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used -to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him -straight--"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he -went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have -been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue -of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male. - -As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest -that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been -affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other -reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to -adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest -instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of -success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with -the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on -terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old -renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make -good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated -obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just -as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or -finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little -less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying -that, automatically, her gods had become his. - -It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations -between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere -of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even -of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is -regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English -criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, -Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family -and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village -ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At -bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic -analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is -of profound importance to society and because they know that what any -man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and -affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind -that all the best biographies even of our American worthies--Hamilton, -Franklin and Lincoln, for instance--have been written by Englishmen! No -one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society -has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, -therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited -his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, -whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his role as a realist and -carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her -heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest -has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and -that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations -and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist -and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of -European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New -Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as -creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. -Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, -she stepped immediately into a role far more truly influential than that -of any President. - -Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and -mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in -any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization -all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual -culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted -down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had -attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social -stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, -fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter -generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular -sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, -imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to -submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august -brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains -on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with -their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The -quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect -based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of -the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice -proclaimed them sacrosanct. - -We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a -presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place--a place -of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, -pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the -daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not -to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame -did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted -almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that -Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of -Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he -had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had -been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect -for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt -himself, the interloper then--he would not have been Carlyle but the -stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark -Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl -without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned -anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been -conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her -friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore--and love -compelled him to do that--he had to win the approval and the pride of -Elmira itself, he had to win the _imprimatur_ of all that vast and -intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the -symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," -that "no one was good enough for her--certainly not this adventurous -soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark -Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy -upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in -order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in -California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his -character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the -"worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover -on his mettle? - -Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this -new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able -to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his -candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the -vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and -lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know, -"he had become suddenly a person of substance--an associate of men of -consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He -was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to -that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to -refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But -could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we -are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his -financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book," -he wrote, "unless there was _money_ in it, and a good deal of it"; he -had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and -"conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were -almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent -and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his -marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already--the best possible -omen for one with his resources--$22,000 in debt! He had put his -shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even -faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so -manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being -equal--and his wife would see to that--he really was a safe, -conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon -capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain, -anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to -cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been -accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course -they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and -besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start -them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in -"The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal -that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, -whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all -significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author -adds, naively, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated -as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon -in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally -stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that -this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his -gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot -forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable -street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage -and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous _menage_. -It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's -wedding day!--he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the -confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely -committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the -outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly -shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had -foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, -"lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper -enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the -ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the -ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged -it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound -himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that -Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo _Express._ -Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business -man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one. - -The full consequences of this moral surrender--shall we call it?--can -only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, -precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently -and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he -might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in -his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many -other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven -back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect _horror_ and -heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the -bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I -cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I -suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you -would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have -wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems -to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who -was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His -bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. -"Farewell--a long farewell--to business!" he exclaimed during those -weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will _never_ touch -it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I -will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as -follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good -and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer -up--don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has -been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. _Except_ when I think of -you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving -and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem -to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the -dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but -no dishonor--and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, -Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she -doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't -convince _me_!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary -of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before -all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, -who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her -husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind -in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. -She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and -all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in -the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to -retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very -ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he -was involved more and more deeply in it. - -As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation -as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should -adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that -he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the -matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had -promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was -laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed -his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical -type--at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete -invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to -sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her -back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, -to arise and walk--Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, -and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. -"I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark -Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first -child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal -absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his -wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I -am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am -done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith -to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What -chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the -pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find -his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never -possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new -life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are -valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are -admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that -private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime -interests of man. - -"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is -said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and -the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all -matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. -"Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of -supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for -the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a -little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely -going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had -been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; -but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and -purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his -personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she -set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in -each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward -the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, -indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; -she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of -religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his -religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens -had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... -It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family -prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a -Bible chapter." Thus was reestablished over him that old Calvinistic -spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a -child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what -fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious -man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, -for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," -says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly -with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with -the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the -proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had -long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she -prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness -to which he, the chivalrous Southerner--the born cavalier, in -reality--could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him -"Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in -keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could -never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only -accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he -gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her -"exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own -judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as -another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would -quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral." - -It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the -blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in -turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive -about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me -do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was -partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, -but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between -the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial -body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in -their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was -also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried -to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having -annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in -order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose -approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of -embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table -that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, -"and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was -almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the -guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells -after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells -bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than -we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last -moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send -her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more -for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for -mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, -after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had -privately suggested to you that we hadn't any _frames,_ and that if you -wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was -simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How _could_ -you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive -nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have -been intolerable to her that, at the _Atlantic_ dinners, her husband, in -spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood -was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as -Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, -unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all -hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his -Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace -does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my -list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I -was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my -repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as -an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not -been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it -tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, -as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods. - -Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character -can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his -marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter -of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of -letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept -him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial -assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo _Express_; in return, -he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his -Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be -immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate -editorship of the Buffalo _Express_ without a single word of comfort or -encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to -be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word -shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom -is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more -innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage -had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of -chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already -induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting -"parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal, -the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could -manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief -censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed -him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture, -meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please -Boston--impossible, terrifying task!--had become as obligatory upon Mark -Twain as to please Elmira. - -We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the -Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider -the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared -to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of -his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston -audience--4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and -he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in -a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a -charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells -was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the -nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the -latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her -husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled -them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter -of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a -court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him--to his -own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to -your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who -takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and -of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject -when Livy took charge of me ... and I may _still_ be to the rest of the -world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no -doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been -enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as -an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own -self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in -behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no -comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were -themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges -of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's -neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It -seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an -old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great -embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder -that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do -about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats -and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In -this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility--provincial because it -was without a sense of proportion--were kept constantly before his mind -and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the -Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad -threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple -Delilah his wife. - -For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a -taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The -criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens -and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they -formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to -read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of -life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could -not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion -of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud, -under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible -and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive -ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, -was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold -novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language -for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at -work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so -greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather -discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all. -"Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs. -Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable -damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other -way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind -fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And -shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by -the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy -says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're -going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly -gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits -and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody -might have written but whose romantic mediaevalism was equally -respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs. -Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have -been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." -Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural -genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such -subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if -we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in -these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of -"blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark -Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only -tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly -pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds: -"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He -persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet -acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to -friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so -little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this -mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, -precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to -live down. - -Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the role of critic and censor. A -memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over -the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her -task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them: - - Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word - would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty - often. - - But can't I get it in _any_where? You've knocked it out - every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, - good word. - - Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing - a slave boy. - - It's out, and my father is whitewashed. - - Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change - "breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. - I would take that and "offal" out of the language. - - You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. - - - -We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive -as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility -and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, -no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no -artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for -bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his -latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as -something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of -conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, -specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; -and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to -further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially -as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, -as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash -not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. -Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't -afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his -letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the -"swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the -thing Huck would say"--namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark -Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a -certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of -Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it -into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his -conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the -German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. -Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. -Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute -she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her -tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to -miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. -Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my -scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little -one-sided?" - -They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers -behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for -an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. -"Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party--in -Rome--he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one -wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. -Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, -you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, -regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've -been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these -tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an -ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. -Very humiliating, and also very tragic! - -Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western -life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to -win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, -seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant -word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of -liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess -that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" -was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that -grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to -formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, -free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, -he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins -themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And -in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all -the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, -instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the -genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature -and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to -seek. - -Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain -Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty -years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough -in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it -assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he -wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his -little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up -and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one -more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do -anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, -and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one -locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in -1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular -success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he -had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from -pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire--we know it as -much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his -own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious -to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of -corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was -here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid -before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: -'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere -magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself--publish it -first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some -of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There -was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of -the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark -Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe -in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! -The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was -to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great -leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child -who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to -smoke the pipe of truth. - -Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it -shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe -and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man--is it -remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, -happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, -the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game -as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns -an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life -is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, -as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five -on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week -day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss -wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, -on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a -will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from -responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of -creating standards of his own and living up to them? - -"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," -wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which -influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets -him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find -himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose -approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's -command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a -deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views -which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and -blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in -public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like -the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his -environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color--had -he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul? - -"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his -life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had -never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor -express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more -idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any -possibility have occurred to him to _resolve_ to become brave. He _could -not originate the idea_--it had to come to him from the _outside_." - -The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of -Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic -plea in self-extenuation? - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - - - "Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole - capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he - cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping - friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what - one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. - This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ." - - IBSEN: _Letter to Brandes_,1870. - - -And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that -all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, -uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and -passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who -used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. -Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher -of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark -Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and -unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he -has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every -great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous -relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined -to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian -interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the -labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his -individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to -type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer -environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering -in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, -from the outset of his life, subjected itself! - -Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy -as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," -he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition -was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and -uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas -and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an -expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; -trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark -Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a -person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven -to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they -did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, -to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the -husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the -purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and -entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of -his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this -narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so -powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that -instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood. - -We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's -universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he -seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his -fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his -nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. -"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a -heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes -and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and -lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came -home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its -eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from -this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed -neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the -worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one -great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's -home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his -domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any -monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; -it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And -having accepted the role of the opulent householder, he threw into it as -much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work. - -Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going -to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses -were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up -to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," -"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, -according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to -increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at -hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for -explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those -who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand -that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, -mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something -almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent -considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of -living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for -some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, -not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel -Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the -visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently -extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was -living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses -amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In -the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could -furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and -highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural -taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, -would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those -early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his -"disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that -finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large -hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, -"he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and -delight of his guests. There were _always_ guests; they were coming and -going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a -'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of -his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay -the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he -virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer -months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his -mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these -things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that -they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed -for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit -cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more -ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the -child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she -found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy! - -To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the -public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the -beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large -consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of -adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up -in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of -the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have -remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and -become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing -need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a -professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a -waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt -requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of -casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a -postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use--not to mention -the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were -his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. -He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of -other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding -he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first -author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work--his -impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in -this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"--that he -had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had -been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can -add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and -one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see -one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact -that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to -which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to -the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the -following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of -marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a -spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises -amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is -not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two -hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained -of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had -to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no -choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he -had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of -his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one -month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to -redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for -a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries -of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred -million dollars. - -Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced -in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to -heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? -Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the -distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy -with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to -follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book -because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"--for this he -had, in fact, become--he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might -say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular -enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the -same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the -proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns -to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he -who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten -days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative -principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at -least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, -gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make -millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of -authors--he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the -country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, -"reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone -of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions -a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing -themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them -three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if -his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift -and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he -is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, -impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against -the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it -with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he -has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, -"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means -of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He -"liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was -pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger -to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of -his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of -the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him--"here I -am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt -gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that? - -For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had -adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, -position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation -of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe. - -He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more -oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the -trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What -were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of -Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General -Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the -"Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. -It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it -was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for -getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were -secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost -consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish -weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own -shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what -he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly -confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for -a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, -penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain, -untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, -immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most -interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is -quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of -Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing -figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration -of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because -of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his -faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he -admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, -is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race -prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of -imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American -business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever -held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was -Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut -Yankee," had set out to make mediaeval England a "going concern" could -hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that -phenomenon in all history. - -Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view -of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European -letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the -appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are -told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his -family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a -distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of -the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be -ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated -by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a -feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity -student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he -told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the -deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to -us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew -him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and -circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find -him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely -imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was -carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters -to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged -in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything -on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the -cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it -was in his power and his fame. - -Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in -the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set -against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, -Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the -headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and -infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has -seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with -complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept -as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding -materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing -so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In -1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a -Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of -improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested -that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he -was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the -great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the -framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far -Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the -colors of the privileged class which the new industrial regime had -brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a -member. - -His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his -essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in -the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to -his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence -and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends -the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for -the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets -the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy -which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more -nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the -tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, -against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I -finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every -time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay -the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not -a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy -of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish -to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, -"Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a -scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a -Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous -defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, -tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he -was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one -situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for -trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he -would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, -frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which -he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent -to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages -in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on -the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on -the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London -drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the -Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the -insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of -sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral -splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men -benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly -opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this -was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time -he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have -afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his -letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry -views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily -written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to -dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud -voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of -his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing -attendance on him!--how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not -hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly -have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the -principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic -victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one -situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate -the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; -and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his -dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an -article passionately advocating that the salaries of American -ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be -devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true -function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing -it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial -society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement. - -As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take -precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with -him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the -pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the -feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on -England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the -scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend -those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson -having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English -Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to -the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, -how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic -bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was -regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. -As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to -include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less -and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself -against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious -tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with -very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive -economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in -his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply -he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, -then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in -his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more -than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had -once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy -Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to -say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I -never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore -when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to -the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant -self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel -of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the -Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for -in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is -lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a -Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book -or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find -him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other -Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into -his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint -Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut -Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch -whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to -accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was -Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself -over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he -who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in -a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy -Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there -recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his -Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of -Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated. - -So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed -reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty -liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the -American nation in the hollow of his hand--the nation, or rather the -epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or -trump--but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home -with his public--he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to -pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he -does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored -family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from -every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark -Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause -would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that -matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole -neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a -unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, -had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor. - -Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character -he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an -uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an -expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his -surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naive worship -of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical -inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of -subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this -let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I -have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, -spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at -all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And -once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular role and had -forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the -pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards -of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he -had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a -reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years -and an ass for fifty-five." - -It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's -instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of -literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was -merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any -other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination -for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other -business man--to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make -money because other people made money and to make more money than other -people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother -Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the -span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I -have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford -it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." -Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was -sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to -realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and -in the other that he had not lived it--for certainly his marriage had -not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public! -Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so -supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no -conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, -he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business -enterprise and of letters. - -"If Sam had got that pocket"--we remember the saying of his old -California comrade--"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of -his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent -of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he -have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes -happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and -perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its _debacle_, Mark -Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to -stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, -"have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had -been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own -books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were -promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to -write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work -altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so -neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes -of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as -well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of -the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing -business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We -have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have -been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": -of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my -retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain -pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we -can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this -ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical -aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning -Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is -simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade -and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, -found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the -material rewards it brought him. - -How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point -of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those -middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised -men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to -the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the -hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. -Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the -literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's -cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how -Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a -personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the -word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as -against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic -of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the -Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain -disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the -Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to -mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her -husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as -nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the -illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was -identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his -brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting -Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion--At 12:20 this afternoon a -line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the -first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was -done _automatically_--instantly--perfectly. This is indeed the first -line of movable types that ever _was_ perfectly spaced and perfectly -justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the -immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. -Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well--dizzy, -stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human -brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful -mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how -wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered -the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was -fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, -too far away--as even his financial interest was too shallow, after -all--to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable -mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, -of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark -Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a -piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of -the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of -the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations -in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he -called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations -are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets -who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's -seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such -people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had -witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and -innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age -for having produced Walt Whitman. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - - - "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test - of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" - - JOHN STUART MILL. - - -We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in -Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America -indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we -recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to -the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every -influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of -opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the -real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling -Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which -had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real -Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained -rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a -child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this -childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual -independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work -as a writer. - -"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous -temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one -written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland -where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three -at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing -that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him -to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. -To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as -we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the -torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got -back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he -could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and -when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he -would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been -so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what -he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I -was the kind of person that _does_ things. Does them and reflects -afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without -asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that -time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been -punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and -reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I -still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and -reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition -of immaturity. - -Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for -gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the -fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed -dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes -of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had -the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were -staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go -down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an -elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at -the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the -dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to -this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he -added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went -back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came -down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a -really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. -To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like -descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place -where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous -at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully -protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk -waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was -seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along -the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the -dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for -his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do -the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. -When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at -Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford -pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was -"planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient -Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would -have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or -rather still, Tom Sawyer? - -Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense -of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of -his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not -Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell -that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a -literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not -affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so -increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our -political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where -that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to -have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and -economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his -traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social -tendencies that had so spectacular a _denouement_ within four years of -his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the -century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's -funeral--"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, -"will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from -now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the -Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was -involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might -almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is -scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy -of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of -it--indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity -regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same -rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think -of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a -succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives -wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that -the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of -Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the -world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification -whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was -"entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political -history." - -And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark -Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. -Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of -sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, -political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would -expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for -example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It -requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious -little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the -communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade -every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the -sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? -Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most -conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly -unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all. - -And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped aesthetic -sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the -common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of -an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch -below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the -majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous -acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world -remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in -heaven":--"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to -have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in -matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is -mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going -to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did -he like? In painting, Landseer--"and the way he makes animals absolute -flesh and blood--insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little -and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could -tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the -beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and -that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than -any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs -America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, -Kipling--"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are -told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a -sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained -his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that -Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the -fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar -Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of -doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbo," -which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was -wholly non-aesthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could -stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. -He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's -"Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have -taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of -all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight -in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and -Thanatopsianism--in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the -most primitive form of aesthetic emotion, combined with just those tints -of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are -characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence. - -Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the -mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his -lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic -self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose -extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes -gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of -letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, -the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of -greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his -own juvenility freely registered itself. - -"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very -remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, -"but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have -developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... -he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even." - -I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the -fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has -been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; -she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been -the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, -childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm -perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of -that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was -in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in -upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of -happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual -and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, -Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children -themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house -always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider -scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish -hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by -trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an -energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have -guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells -reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; -admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, -there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story -of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that -story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown -men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy -was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds -the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps -that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it. - -Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there -ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His -mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and -without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off -as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which -would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from -his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable -were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable -to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was -super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was -doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe. - -Unused, half-used, misused--was ever anything like that energy? Mr. -Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because -his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of -darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing -himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, -because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to -the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant -trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of -gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, -unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to -turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the -final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest -as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead -lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, -thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. -Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been -published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't -have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's -letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His -mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance -that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature -tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's -way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the -fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded -manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts -about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the -interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer -Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in -1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly -tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family -censor--"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a -dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn -Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which -Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death--how many others -were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, -loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in -his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions--how -like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of -authority!--was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast -flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk--was it garrulous, was it not -rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an -undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, -following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, -outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind? - -An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty--could there be a -surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all -this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon -who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two -supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his -writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has -monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art. - -Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits -of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is--where -shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can -write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; -"but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I -didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't -play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that -years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a -play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine -articles and books--and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this -a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a -talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of -letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from -attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but -the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and -well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had -interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those -months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He -appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he -found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of -beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true -even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he -was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the -Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd -contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the -publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know -how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." -This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the -composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, -impossible performance"--no doubt because he had been able to write the -whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only -by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He -wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing -and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing -it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but -incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was -probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more -ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession -of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was -he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in -defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was -the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold. - -In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we -observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden -desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot -master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to -interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of -sustained interest in his work--his lack of interest in literature -itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of -his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the -technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, -surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his -aesthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by -aesthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems -to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in -literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. -Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had -never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother -had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, -he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of -Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, -in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane -Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper--is not -that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here -again there was a positive note--his lifelong preoccupation with -grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas -by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly -verbal!--"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful -German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's -Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," -"General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation -in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells -that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for -saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some -imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling -women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward -the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be -infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are -all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his -first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I -suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in -the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with -letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of -"Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring -from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing -off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to -take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially -never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well? - -Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man -is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his -taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some -slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" -having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years -after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright -copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, -although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to -understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, -obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human -spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The -Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark -Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the -expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through -the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican--all the galleries.... We -examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, -Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we -didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar -stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We -fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor -and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its -pet feature--there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and -Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a -hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, -more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known -was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the -American people of his time were simply the English middle class -transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to -Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to -have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife -and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had -subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his -mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an -old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream -of the "land of Egypt"--Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at -all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European -tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. -His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of -the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry -and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of -Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with -these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which -had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all -the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage. - -How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine -speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to -construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate -personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief -gifts--transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater -at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are -indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation -in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process -of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of -them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in -design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or -historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," -"Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom -Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he -said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he -assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon -his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose -in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the -Mississippi"--and even there it is the river itself and not its human -nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in -Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of -American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never -become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over -that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed -to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his -characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has -sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only -characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded -Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, -he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and -what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: -unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he -says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined -sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the -book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not -attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail -how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in -passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is -perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been -transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. -He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in -consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even -to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of -his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos -of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: -consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear -of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his -imagination. - -We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit -with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the -artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of -influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas -are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's -imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except -for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his -own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own -spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without -development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins--a -fact he naively confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": -"Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost -entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private -venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not -to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. -When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded -by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal -experience. - -Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage -that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson -Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he -had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had -come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It -was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should -write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he -set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and -stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": -we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down -the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, -because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in -nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never -used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems -hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to -write for the _Atlantic_ and it is only then that fresh memories rise in -his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand -for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to -Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A -Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful -for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even -"Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not -spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the -story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in -him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in -another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells -to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written -for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and -slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to _The Atlantic_," says Mr. -Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and -before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to -work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of -it are condemned here and there and yonder." - -Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious -"laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary -sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at -the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on -authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that -to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but -what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose -luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, -especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in -bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy -comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that -indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to -spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no -doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his -matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether -useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too -seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent -assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, -and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign -that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of -those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with -all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a -boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a -journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the -goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low -that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged -him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the -capitalist regime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of -reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system -in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare -himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was -predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 -of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very -last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide -repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: -'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one -imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But -who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from -a lazy line? - -It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can -explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was -subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take -notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make -speeches." That innocent _reclame_ of his, that irresistible passion for -the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to -have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his -inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart -had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For -court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living -that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done -worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four -months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on -the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one -of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was -dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into -which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed -into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been -able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that -role the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" -he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to -be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." -And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that -he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing -quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the -truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent -youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them -into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of -being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of -his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who -certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a -passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the -last man gave out from sheer exhaustion." - -For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his -work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an -increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly -have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We -remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the _Quaker -City_ excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically -meaningless to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless that it -seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in -my mind as a pleasant memory.... An accusing conscience gives me peace -only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it -but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by -the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to -penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the -change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the -Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from -"art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and -duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the -first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier, -"before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river -itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his -task explaining, in that connection, the difference between -"theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just -so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more -so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the -'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has -become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that -descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an -absolutely certain financial success--how repellant it became to him as -time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the -self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell -that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't -have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, -and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and -propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down -went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he -had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief? -"The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to -finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A -Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it. -He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted -child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a -charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the -moment in the approval of his wife. - -We have seen--and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his -arrested development--that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for -literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What -is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in -his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think--over-expressed -it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so--in something he wrote once -of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as -we say, more than for aught else whatever--cared for them with that kind -of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond -votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a -refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect -freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark -Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My -right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write -this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it--no, I mean 1,000,000--next -fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't -have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have -been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost -cynical indifference, of insolence even. - -Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a -significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the -creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, -"his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on -his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far -behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and -it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his -best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his -judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and -certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can -take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything -but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with -such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object -in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had -approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the -craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how -exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!--"possibly the book may -not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." But more -striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven -times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of -preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation -and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously -exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in -that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully. -What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for -"Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he -had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own -fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular -pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them -anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from -the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious -ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of -indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey -of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve -years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his -delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine, -the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying--that spirit which -came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly -gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which -tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the -dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a _rechauffe_ for children, -for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no -doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely -treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the -book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never -known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains -in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship. - -If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine -the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same -time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive -stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession, -have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think -of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was, -says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw.... -On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably -would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence -due?--"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all -but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with -all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent, -prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in -one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get -a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his -"laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform, -and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought -always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice -of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have -said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in -fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his -essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the -_raconteur_ of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is -just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of -mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of -the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a -boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land -because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him -reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had -remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To -tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper -places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at -last--oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control, -to spring that final effect of horror!--there was something worthy of a -man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in -his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable -through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and -training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age -of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, -to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had -Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential -authority, with that old negro _raconteur_, that old pilot of the -Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark -Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his -best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, -the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as -often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had -expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at -least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at -least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: -in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring -masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and -thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass -muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the -others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, -inherited folk-skill--he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist -ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his -_metier_, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever -more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going -his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. -Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual -consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had -remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural -genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with -which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he -found open before him. - -It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life -should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it -now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and -why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The -autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on -hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because -they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore, -that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it -is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either -internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until -it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open -and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary -number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the -surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which -is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the -American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial -success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse, -characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find -him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an -absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885, -at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained -his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you -can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had -"assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he -had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was -the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually -recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote _con -amore_ were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not -only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something -in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he -was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men--that was the -public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business -men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the -phrase, "children of a larger growth"? - -Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he -seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" -could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly -"Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. -But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom -Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he -associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a -publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" -and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic -consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its -real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, -all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious -Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, -though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. -Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is -clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys -through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its -bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de -Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with -love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this -happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says -that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best -book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown -in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to -a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it -on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One -might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a -hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays -which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of -the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift -stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering -itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books -alone--these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering -on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the -ground. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - - - "Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters." - - ALEXANDER HARVEY. - - - -At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going -through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of -men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a -certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you -would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, -however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is -only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the -guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack -and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact -this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the -imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the -trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another -self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you -perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has -become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in -the twinkling of an eye. - -So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no _real_ morals," he wrote in one -of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and -preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." -Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality -of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but -upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial -morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, -as we have seen, had conformed to a moral regime in which the -profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been -submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the -respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to -depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the -explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self -had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had -concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct -of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that -instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and -manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never -having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to -air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were -black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning -Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant -blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on -it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the -conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it. - -First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he -was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social -regime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious -self urged him to maintain these values and this regime. His unconscious -self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him -in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his -story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the -famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, -he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse -races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with -his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi -diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his -best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two -incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the -symbol of Mark Twain himself. - -Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged -on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was -always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the -floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by -apprehensions--badgered, harassed"--and let us add Mr. Paine's -adjectives--"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset," -till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent -the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he -always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his -will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant, -fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental -desire pointed him just the other way? - -Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had -submerged himself in the role of the husband, the father, the neighbor, -the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His -absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development -of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain -was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house -was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own -drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent -caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the -householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one -observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting -against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being -"bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and -tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and -wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." -Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or -getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results -too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain -became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only -just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, -he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so -extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which -developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one -of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and -the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with -her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have -been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not -qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone -who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose -myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which -the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other -caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old -Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic -protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. -Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's -constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found -in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely -inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. -We can see from this that although his conscious life had been -overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, -his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature. - -And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of -Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that -"heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations -like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists -mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate, -that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of -Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness -and priggishness of his own _entourage_? I should go even further, I -should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark -Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had -regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially; -Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for -gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written -to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted -classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of -the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be -as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the -encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; -but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of -fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language. -But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's -literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he -"detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written -by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored -them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have -despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste -was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a -par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his -wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had -accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his -unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to -please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything -about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's -criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude -of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious -self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how -strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself -directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its -teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated -bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic -aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the -repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend -Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, -and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a -companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he -roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried -self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a -prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model. - -We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious -observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when -the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked -on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies -behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were -together on a lecture tour?--"You will never, never know, never divine, -guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made -until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has -taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and -troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke -of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." -His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for -Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," -he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them--they have found a -hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in -fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. -White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar -books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors--after -Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot--were Pepys, Suetonius and -Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, -and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the -cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such -passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely -"spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is -Man?"--"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. -For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I -ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other -difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when -at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: -"Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as -unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, -kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (_and -could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not -I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no -other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which -his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for -Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually -praising their "unrestrained frankness." - -And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of -parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark -Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he -wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. -Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over -Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he -would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold -fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism -was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been -permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to -ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. -Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the -time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the -English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and -assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could -not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the -riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he -poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of -a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at -a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity -among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, -has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard -one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that -are current in every New York publishing house? - -In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful -ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through -the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the -unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait -for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the -_outre_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia -Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark -Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon -upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and -they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and -thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it -from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily -search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and -oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in -order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they -were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort -of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the -texture of Mark Twain's writings. - -For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through -with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In -the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. -In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been -prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or -by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship -which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some -contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, -are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In -such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully -satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a -compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two -railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms -of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud -has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any -reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we -are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious -bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those -embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that -express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies -wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon -which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or -rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this -process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, -certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am -writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some -manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On -these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be -straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." -When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead -Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was -frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote -his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about -himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia -of his soul. - -Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, -for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the -first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is -proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the -book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American -Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he -wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. -Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly -expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to -be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that -never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion -mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself -once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in -short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed -were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that -sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such -times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all -sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits -of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible -animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort -on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a -propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved -abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to -literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in -the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally -been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian -monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant -farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce -to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing -circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but -two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed -the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. -That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed -further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it -stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of -passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry -satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, -that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far -relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the -battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our -very eyes. - -Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of -"wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is -surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the -celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward -J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the -Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they -made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the -celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this -Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him. - -Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate -of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is -the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by -the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note -the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the -unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is -a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu -of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. - -This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead -Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with -Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an -author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that -Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he -continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply -another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the -same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been -privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar, -with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; -appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and -fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful -of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But -irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for -it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided -without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson -was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt -for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him -before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a -genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed -here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets -generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his -scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't -it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired -Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it -possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was -picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? -Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures -Pudd'nhead out-manoeuvring the village folk and triumphing over them -in the end. - -Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame -and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more -or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says -Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally -and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were -never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. -For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of -self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and -that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one -but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole -community--of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by -leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield -and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted -incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens," -the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all -those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his -true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and -admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it--it was -these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon -him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who -took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their -hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a -deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in -the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the -misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, -the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to -recognize its divinity? - -Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the -"wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the -desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself -in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the -suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells -about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body -"a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, -far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no -chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale -of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of -a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old -castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into -subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation -for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that. -As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American -Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age," -who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after -one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his -own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful -claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those -fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure -projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business -life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet -forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true -rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark -Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to -account for his constant preoccupation with this idea. - -Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his -old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that -flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and -fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have -been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in -himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese -Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the -usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle -perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and -"The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that constitutes "The Prince -and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the role of the -beggar-boy--Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn -himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the -Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically -slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of -incompatibles bound together in one flesh--the Extraordinary Twins, the -"good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad" -boy of whom society disapproves--how many of Mark Twain's stories and -anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!--does he -not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history -of his life? - -We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was -expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become -owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the -poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American -progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," -the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the -discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more -wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been -discussing, however, we can see that while the censorship had been -sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his -unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to -cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his -saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like -Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant," -thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where -"prosperity and position constitute rank." Here, as in the malevolent, -Mephistophelian "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we -perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save -his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained -fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his -finger-print invention--otherwise he would find something better to do -than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how -could you expect a young English snob to know anything about democracy? -That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his -readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would -know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the -great American game of bluff they would have to forgive _him_! As long -as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short, -he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the -public in the hollow of his hand, knew it. - -It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand -the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn." -Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little -boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let -himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the -writing and the fate of this book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to -have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the -publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain! -Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pass the -censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an -irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this -world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization. -That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity -we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting -to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons -attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to -find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he -can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive! -Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness -are so many shields behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of -the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his -unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical -passages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the -mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by -the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has -the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: -"There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The -withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the -sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in -his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism -in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have -appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the -lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial -detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation. -"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," -says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable -on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!--that raft and that -river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole -unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds -and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of -the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"? -Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was -not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright, -shining arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is -because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that -gave it its momentum. - -Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was -intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the role of a demiurge, in -fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and -misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for -this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed! -Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs, -petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the -domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those -second parents who had taken the place of his first--we have to thank -it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and -general revolt of Huckleberry Finn: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; - she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - - "Well, everybody does that way, Huck." - - "Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I - can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub - comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that - way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in - a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. - Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got - to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to - git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder - wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she - wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before - folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now - these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I - ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...." - -This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see -what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - - - "To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is - nobler and less trouble." - - _Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._ - - -And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant -Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he -was in revolt against a role which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust -upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc" -anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark -Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous -writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other -than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, -we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic -development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this -career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that -found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his -decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious -and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige -had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark -Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and -what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and -at the same time achieved such ample material rewards. - -It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we -have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; -and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency -who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a -humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he -was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of -Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. -Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, -sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of -chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous -cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society -required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems -to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a -distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition--the -battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it -seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, -when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is -the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind -it." - -Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark -Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that -in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found -that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his -diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do _hate_ to go -back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from -mining. "We fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada -as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman -say, the other day, that it was the 'd----dest country under the -sun'--and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never -rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green -thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the -purest--most unadulterated and uncompromising--_sand_." And as with the -setting--so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, -"the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on -him": more than once he found it necessary--this young man of -twenty-eight--"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat -Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs -and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." -That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own -testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d----n San Francisco style -of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made -his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands--"God, what a contrast with -California and the Washoe"!--ever sweet and blessed in his memory. -Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was -this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also -call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which -also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of -his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he -was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was -always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill -his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr. -Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic -waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of -the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam -swear."--Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was -living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation. - -Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of -pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life. -It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with -domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that -sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as -we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was, -nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or -satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were -civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom -civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable -avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which -their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, -they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were -blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, -that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children -were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how -hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining -population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex -tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single -monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which -kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse -in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually -impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept -a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to -conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask -of a rough good-fellowship that found expression mainly in the nervously -and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the -gambling-hell. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which -peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, -quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the very pick and choice of -the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing -It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or -decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed -hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon -the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof -of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed. - -Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that -life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the -fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The -gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an -outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of -masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the -intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the -human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering -one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps -the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was -almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the -day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so -common--that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the -newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his -old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated -duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of -chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser -degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the -pioneers? - -But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that -individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and -preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering -itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but, -victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not -withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from -openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already -pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers -in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were -always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in -calling a relief from restraint. - -We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were -subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the -most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most -complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances -where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most -general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was -the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a -life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the -necessity of making money, of succeeding--the same impulse had brought -him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain -was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from -attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised -and because to have done so would have required just those expressions -of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other -hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of -all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those -outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his -companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never -"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged -physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. -"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty -years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have -lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still -retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that -would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out -into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in -the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his -instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had -to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a -life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he -became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of -individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship of public -opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada. - -Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some -kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, -since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, -had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the -artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, -far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark -Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in -order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he -acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his -individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, -his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different" -or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how -urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society -where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself -by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his -profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing -at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see -from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of -his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was -always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his -humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men -laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short, -of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief -in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those -acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of -consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious -jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will -hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he -could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those -conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this -vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time -keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming -his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a -relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose -investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, -the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of -expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic -effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke -or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely -safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist -in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of -those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of -one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than -the editors had spoken each of the other")--his comrades were able, -without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own -exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred -and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship -that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain -himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to -maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the -position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader. - -For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular -ferocity. The very titles of his Western I sketches reveal their general -character: "The Dutch Nick Massacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing -Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Caesar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in -the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his -labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the -doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the -phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to -kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead -Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape -hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It -began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a -special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; -but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was -"unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, -the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, -in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt -officials--we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own -painfully honest brother Orion--were frankly afraid of him. "He was very -far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any -way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even -from trying to be a humorist! - -Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik -Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, -found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all -that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down -upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not -enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man -with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same -way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own -childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of -Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged -by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his -antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of -satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest -of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in -him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his -pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated -and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike -he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is -the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in -corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of -things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not -seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was -an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, -their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change -things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a -counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very -moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive -instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to -express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have -led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an -end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as -human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired -Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief -they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could -not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been -compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He -had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a -campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine -says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As -a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote -criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the -result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco -papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a -correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we -are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long -restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the -"humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in -California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from -expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in -short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to -remain a humorist. - -In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover -the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who -found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter -of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no -value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same -trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." -Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he -had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps -we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor -consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't -know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as -surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists -of a sort who lack the courage to admit it. - -Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I -say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to -carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of _The Galaxy,_ to -which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct -a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" -his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a -humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have -already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the -pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the -rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business -men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. -The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for -ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national -demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by -Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at -last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact. - -I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the -Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of -Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly -homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we -have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile -because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or -restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us -feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile _because_! -In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The -"cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all -his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and -as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far -from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in -these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and -even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark -Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches -in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, -lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small -harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances -of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; -but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, -all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the -same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than -the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's -humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the -same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is -to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" -that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us -from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to -murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from -the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us -to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a -phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the -last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is -the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the -demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he -made upon his environment, had become, _pari passu_, progressively more -stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as -barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why -perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment -favorable for a regime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who -has risen," the typical American, himself a business man? - -Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of -succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but -complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the -stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general -"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been -characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation -was practically organized--by a sort of common consent--on the plan of -a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed -to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and aesthetic -development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised -the success of the business regime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark -Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to -the efficiency of this business regime, because it helped to maintain -the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as -it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the -Western pioneer. - -As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business -man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the -"strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an -aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he -find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way -and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an -aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, -diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the -creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic -cooperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts -for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that -expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." -Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional -freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a -retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: -consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, -confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On -the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, -everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, -reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and -responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual -and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor -does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought--and -especially irreverent toward them!--when they gave him a seat below the -salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and -absurd everything of a spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual nature the -recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the -smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as -we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at -antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an -infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being. -That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a -hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the -spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, -involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader -to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional -stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all -these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure -in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much -as the pioneer. - -Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether -they corroborate this argument. - -In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself -seated directly behind a young girl: - - How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she - would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own - thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer - pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy - dreams,--no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit - still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of - a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young - figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the - gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, - tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy - cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy - rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and - so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did - mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red - lips parted, and out leaped her thought,--and with such a - guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just _know_ - I've got five hundred fleas on me!" - -This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its -tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all -the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them -so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in -hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, -prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting -into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a -pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by -a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself -evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no -longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a -butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in -the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to -his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions. - -Another example, the famous "oesophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph -of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story": - - It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The - lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, - hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge - provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that - have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; - the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow - flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep - of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous - flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty - sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; - everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of - God. - -We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury -of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its -various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most -careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's -sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation -of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and -thus divert the reader's feeling for it. - -To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life -of the man with an eye single to the main chance--that, one would almost -say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one -of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house -down in order to roast his pig--he destroys, that is to say, an entire -complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single -sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are -manifestations of just that personal, aesthetic or moral distinction -which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish. -Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on -General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous -assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the -human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of -the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success -of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the -final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a -democratic regime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition -of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the -fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a -business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is, -however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious -schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," -says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather -hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him -into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark -Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that -in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for -this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook -his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To -exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our -humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from -any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be -abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" -was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of -beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd -pioneer business man. - -How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The -Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological -moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of -industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become -obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it -was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe! -Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's -own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything -of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were -ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be -ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual -development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that -would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too -costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not -only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate -pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as -Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and -all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind -were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, -yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was -notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial -philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in -civilization, of modern America. "I find your people--your best people, -I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only -talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's -novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there -seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in -their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of -the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of -cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The -Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's "Leaves of -Grass," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one -hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Grass," -having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its -whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that -is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the -individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a -commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true -spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring -every traveling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure of -its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so -far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and -the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far -as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing -satisfaction of Americans with a banker's paradise in which, as long as -it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled. - -So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. I -think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought -him. And are we not already in a position to see why the role of -humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, -why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own -development? - -Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of -the artist. It meant the suppression of his aesthetic desires, the -degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How -can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end -becoming the victim of his own habit? - -I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved -the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and -delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love -for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for -charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the -Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish -knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands -on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing -something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business -man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation -of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he -continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more -advanced aesthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one -of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the -irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: -one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually -"taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty -becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of -art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven." -In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions -of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. -Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective -coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by -stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself -a scarred child. - -He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day -come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal -humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was -satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great -purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of -which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was -he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he -lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the -"sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his -proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of -moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual -position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating -stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the -indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the -energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became -but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his -"high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by -saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as -fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of -harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that -world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked -everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an -endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that -equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out -of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can -appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after -all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief -life-saver." - - - - -CHAPTER X - -LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - - - "No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence - of ladies." - - _A Double-Barrelled Detective Story_. - - -"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your -works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political -tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain -himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant -intention of Mark Twain's genius, the role which he was, if one may say -so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. -Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with -Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, -Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, -that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him -thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that -extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance -of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the -wish for the deed? - -What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds -up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the -inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is -Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the -obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Moliere holding up to the measure -on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, -intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the -intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism -of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is -embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely -conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain -cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he -did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government -his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly -speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and -government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil -community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view -of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes -for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the -fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? -Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social -life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of -our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own -humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the -support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities -and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw -bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else -begin." - -It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be -sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his -nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, -despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, -he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand -for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so -involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he -could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his -friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to -him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen -that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great -impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even -feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the -wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead -of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and -even flattered it. - -If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to -be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the -puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author -of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediaevalism of -sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to -divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his -generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric -clay-bank: many of the vertebrae are missing, other parts have crumbled -away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. -But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are -beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in -assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills -out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been. - -When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small -change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty -aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos -of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see -that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he -says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity -toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct -without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing -from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his -father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's -a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He -delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms -as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after -to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who -is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as -impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at -night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One -was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't -say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was -interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle -Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and -it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of -interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the -continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages -indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior -cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the -satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can -substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has -abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark -Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his -instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, -political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in -private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave -conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made -progress--the first progress in 'ages and ages'--colossal progress. In -what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which -add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But -the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The -materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that -there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was -before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is -a vast change (due to them) in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and -all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme -ideal--all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations -named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the -world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This -lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, -dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of -Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that -he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the -great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, -that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his -friends were the unconscious agents of the business regime, bent upon -deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have -seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering? - -Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was -perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed -into the role that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what -did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country -some of these days when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the -spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich -writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark -Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary -confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the -financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path -of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a -brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read -'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a -cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked -on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those -days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 -or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, -excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to -eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry -Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by -the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great -centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. -If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have -been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested -for his first important book--"The New Pilgrim's Progress"--was regarded -in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing -Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only -when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed -to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but -loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same -gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: -it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose -"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is -obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to -attack them? - -His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it -is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," -that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the -frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a -sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the -readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he -could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky -note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, -that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of -the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" -lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the -case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not -noticing these little spots on the American sun? - -In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems -frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen -that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief -embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been -the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of -speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are -all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and -generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and -politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there -are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed -out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly -animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact -the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand -old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its -devasting irony about every American institution save family -life--Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education -and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's -final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet -the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth -lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain -number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to -redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so--for the story -was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford--by -making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up -young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the -softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, -for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had -the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? -"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but -had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He -welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint -authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a -return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; -Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the -sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one -might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the -West. - -Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an -accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was -too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this -earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg"--not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever -again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of -industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great -Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as -"a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we -know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had -once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, -"that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too -often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that -having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels -backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he -feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the -seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth -century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century -France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The -Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again -the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a -contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the -"Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark -Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King -Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on -corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he -not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who -are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's -biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, -begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form -that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to -estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, -in his private memoranda--"do right and you will be conspicuous." - -Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's -intention and failure in his predestined role, the "Connecticut Yankee" -itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the -most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. -Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in -writing it. - -What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he -says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for -America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their -sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to -me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good -intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level -of manhood in turn." - -No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have -blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of -him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. -Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating -gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always -have been slightly irritating--he was irritating even at home, and how -much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to -dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw -red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon -General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, -an attack upon America _and_ upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark -Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book -as the publisher of General Grant, upon his _amour-propre_ as the -countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like -a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a -typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're -another!"--just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul -Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to -put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis -and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of -the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a -frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could -not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities -like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't -tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all -that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered -both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole -English race, indeed, to come and knock them off. - -Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a -satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in -the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, -unconsciously, into a sort of _bouleversement_ of all his actual -personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds -himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up -the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher -level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but -to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In -short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to -do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee -mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours -ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of -the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were -sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages. - -Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's -genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did -not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle -years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his -letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was -absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can -see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A -Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old -Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and -Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to -Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and -thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear -date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my -word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there -was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I -to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; -there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this -progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of -Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that -he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he -proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to -those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something -rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a -land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being -possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up -to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the -inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average -rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous -wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the -seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about -that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected -from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it -might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of -space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he -calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there -is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace--_the approval of -his neighbors and the public_. And perhaps there is something which he -dreads more than he dreads pain--the _disapproval_ of his neighbors and -the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the -disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their -approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous -letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by -deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only -wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in -even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated -classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always -hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to -instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can -get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to -"pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its -objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles -of simple folk! They are the most successful of all. - -The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark -Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection -and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he -records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here -if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. -Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its -institutions"--its institutions, observe--"its fair rural aspects, he -had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; -against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so -admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons -for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed -him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first -English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many -of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English -readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark -Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class -of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that -Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful -heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? -But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, -as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid -its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their -hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, -merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately -desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have -already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of -this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was -this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely -personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in -reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark -that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was -his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public -figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, -in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his -responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of -humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with -him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was -measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without -hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like -the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people -immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the -situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford -neighbors, who had taken him into _their_ hearts and homes?--that was -the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could -not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned -enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize--he was -boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to -satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize -not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won. - -Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine -tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was -badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was -highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the -"Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business -with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author, -we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the -publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be -popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have -been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the -top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the -exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial -pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make -King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?-- -"Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck -and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest -field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the -English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting -the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the -great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks -neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he -wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain -had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the -spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the -magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, -less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also. - -"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it." -Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that -remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable -only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long -deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom -Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be -read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find -him adding: "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." Tell the truth or trump--but get the -trick! - -Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal -processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, -that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success -and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two -letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who -was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive -feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, -as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings -and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable -way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for -his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody -contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, -Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to _mail_ this letter; he understands -that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no -harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a -volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his -crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he -would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one -writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a -very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot -embers in it here and there." - -Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask -himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he -accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the -priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the -accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and -cannot employ it. - -Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark -Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he -finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to -dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. -To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the -premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the -most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, -that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would -have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been -arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those - illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, - obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the - Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war - into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all - respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I - taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to - modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. - MARK. - - DEAR COLONEL--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a - lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK. - -And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that -he announced he was going to show it to the Czar: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the - illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing - but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war - with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty - centuries history will not get done admiring these men who - attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved - it. MARK TWAIN. - -Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful -fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To -Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' -stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had -told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. -'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up -and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. -'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men -can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' -He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he -was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions -and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! -And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in -this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment -to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible -playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars -up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to -support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation." - -Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain -was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes -to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far -more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was -always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to -America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his -aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him -a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious -wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into -the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir -in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position -carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders -to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal -ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, -was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of -reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who -appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. -"The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more -intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the -affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and -punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure -punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a -cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts -which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all -respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I -think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, -boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect -upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or -Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an -assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of -"brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most -pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer. - -This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the -Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who -attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other -hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what -everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society -Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but -monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who -took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in -actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it -appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, -as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the -nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, -the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could -not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the -spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, -for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the -spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was -personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. -Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to -print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion -behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was -the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents -Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by -disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered -the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own -genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a -whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold -quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding. - -Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old -age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared -to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's -biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled -satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an -impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those -merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance -upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him -to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer -interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his -childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; -he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of -his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he -imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. -He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought -in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, -"needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have -done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we -see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and -Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. -Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he -never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The -religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he -meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't -he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those -theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes -about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from -his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his -environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think -of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make -people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with -infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to -curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes -in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, -in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells -Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs -and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. -2006--which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment -of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," -saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so -far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs -one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the -trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the -publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk. - -Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered -life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had -found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth -and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The -absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous -conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's -pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven -is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote -in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he -dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a -single feature in it that he _actually values_. It consists--utterly -and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on -the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do -not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are -singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about -two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in -a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not -many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have -variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you -have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented -a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is -like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too -rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the -tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, -in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent -impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of -"Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, -something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the -civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the -illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what -civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in -his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a -world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen -it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, -"until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating -sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut -Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, -and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted -nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim -of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of -life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol -promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that -is pathology. - -Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was -always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he -oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture -of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification -or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the -satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an -ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, -never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also -that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the -works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 -Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. -Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a -man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and -looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a -billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it -with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might -say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect -it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have -the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the -picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is -able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple -contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never -completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they -invariably led into this _cul-de-sac_. If life is really futile, then -writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make -life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility -is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it -might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it _is_ -full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present -sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never -attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in -the air. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -MUSTERED OUT - - - "... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the - others were all still asleep." DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI. - - -And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly -liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him -and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his -defeat. - -"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday -speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe -no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a -time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your -term, well or less well, and you are mustered out." - -What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon -his life? - -"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," -"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived -in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the -public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we -print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries -and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot -had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once -and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the -creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and -he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write -frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of -Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you -ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose -opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic -naivete of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought -or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential -priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross -and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, -immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt -contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your -immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined -to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found -out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is -true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence -of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so -doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far -from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering -forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of -youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; -you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of -the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain -thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out." - -His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy -years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and -awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have -oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon -your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck -Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with -Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in -this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has -become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, -unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant -growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in -matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of -national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches -now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played -this role in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the -clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain -perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": -the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world -as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd -it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly -fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous -nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the -more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the -vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon -the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of -the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any -one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general -spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who -said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize -that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for -the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient -earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything -essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was -always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of -thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three -times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a -watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the -farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the -gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own -career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the -sort of courage he described in his story "Luck." - -"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so -little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak -out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he -continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same -seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor -(privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my -conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. -There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal -to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said -some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will -not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did -he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise -we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not -rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long -habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double -personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to -redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and -comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had -kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not -sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had -kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of -the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old -imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long -deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How -it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a -little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark -Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the -truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week -he found that he no longer had the strength. - -Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to -Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing -for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and -have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance -to write a book without reserves--a book which should take account of no -one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, -illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my -heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I -judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is -under way, now, and it _is_ a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book -was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing -it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his -desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil -upon the passion that possessed him. At once this craving reasserted -itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?" -He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his -friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he -felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire -still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind -on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a -mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path -out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he -writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden -emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous, -however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into -later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men -in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him": -there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth -now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth--anything that it would -hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored -the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother -Orion to write an autobiography that would spare nobody's feelings and -would let all the cats out of the bag: "Simply tell your story to -yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing," he -had told him. Let Orion do it! we can almost hear him whispering to -himself; and Orion had done it. "It wrung my heart," wrote Mr. Howells -of that astounding manuscript, "and I felt haggard after I had finished -it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had -found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was -himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as -Mr. Paine tells us, "a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even -his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down." To write such -a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed -what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for -autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for -confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to -redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something -unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who -spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in -the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of -himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and -plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be -mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom," -he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, -"because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with -theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; -you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm -and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's -indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells, -who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really -indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast -advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against -the sluice-gates of a human soul? - -At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to -be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his -autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he -has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter--the passage is to -be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my -seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six -hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published -in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish -and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall -continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It -is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some -folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons -mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is -something awful." - -You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has -been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a -debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things -about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to -shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about -her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three -"playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but -still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and -Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright -campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in -Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to -exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of -humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the -use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain -universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human -soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that -whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and -space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are -so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your -pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the -mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of -cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going -to have--what magnificently wicked fun! - -You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own -redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book -it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And -what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy -occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are -going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were -published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were -carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in -reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it -in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the -courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his -soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among -the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_ -gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been -dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have -thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I -am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on -paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired -when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I -should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike -them out when I came to revise this book." - -Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark -Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge -Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be -a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the -person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture -to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved -himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what -inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral -slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense -that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to -communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is -Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the -writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will -in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was -incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors. -There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, -if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of -founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at -Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market -value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; -but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was -not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without -the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his. -"It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is -nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys, -in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the -fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had -a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to -publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge -of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually -shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably -have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was -received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _expose_ of -philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just, -that very generous public verdict--for the book is, in fact, quite -worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain--he must have -felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular role of a -Mephistopheles. - -With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the -repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that -civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen -from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference -and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported -by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm -heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and -oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of -the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable -corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in -South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; -Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the -Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering -the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark -Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of -the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive, -the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of -all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore -this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and -weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it -was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone -aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic -attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following -the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his -book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and -"A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against -bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him. -Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his -"Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the -forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit. -Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who -have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the -sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark -Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, -equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juares and the -volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of -a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level, -and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his -animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and -despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself. - -The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his -energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or -another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly -destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a -will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my -feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on -paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become -definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his -great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can -doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks! -Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he -not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department -on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, -when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, -when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible -passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle -pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day -and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not -a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I -have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end -to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says? -Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human -race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was -it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for -means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian -Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy -frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack -upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the -failure in himself. - -And this failure was the failure of the artist in him. - -Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy -in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life -which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire -except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel, -and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old -masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with -anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it -and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I -have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to -do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort -would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what -had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious -sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The -Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime -creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator -of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an -impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born -artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist -destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in -the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious -he is, even this early, of all aesthetic pretensions! What a fierce -grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the -perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle, -he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all -Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of -tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the -peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a -low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark -Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; -he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is -the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to -desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp -unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously -desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, -why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to -produce only one himself, and that a failure. - -We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative -life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates -nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a -machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the -animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he -said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say -nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of -the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is -astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a -retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could -have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind. -But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging -his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off -the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in -the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults -him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in -Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle -expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to -believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon -knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer--see what Macaulay says! Macaulay, -heaven bless us all!--therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark -Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry -Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the -sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who -asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training -makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce -that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written. -But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel -Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had -not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can -hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to -follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession -revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on -faith. - -How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of -his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently -that it was "like the sky--you can't break through anywhere." How much -it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an -irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to -do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in -Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius -is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its -eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior -circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, -upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his -intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for -the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe -with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and -unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no -outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no -outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a -valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would -have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced -something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, -associations and training. In France he would have produced something -better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and -training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to -Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is -enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we -can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking -reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his -half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as -"large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age. - -Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that -we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order -to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, -destroy us, we embrace them with an _amor fati_, to escape from the -contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave -who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, -finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the -possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself. -The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly -temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, -nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep -emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it -honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the -slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and -thirst for freedom. - -Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential -force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in -Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that -fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If -the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in -fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for -greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued -against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will: -he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a -will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose -regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no -spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where -success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is -a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place -of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the -first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be -weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that -Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it -is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How -well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain! -"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human -being is under training. It is his human environment which influences -his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his -road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself -shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval -he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the -way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the -tragedy of it. - -Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark -Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human -mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine -anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a -single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind -from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind -carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which -act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All -day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and -without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 -thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before -his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain -cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as -the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and -controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental -machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of -ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any -help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the -multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen -minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases. -It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite -of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely -independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better -have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark -Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, -chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks -and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't -listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and -wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of -personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, -that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in -these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with -each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book -regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch -inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal -conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the -end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul! - -The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary -psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance. -And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express -through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I -generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not -those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these -"three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me -at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in -the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life -that has been unfolded in these pages. - -"There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being -in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a -living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about -those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought -that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I -am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell -whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. - -"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to -the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am -always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be -funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only -making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they -commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing -there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." - -I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas -that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark -Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to -think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought -of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow," -the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself -inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second -dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing -self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream -worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always -"trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has -lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great -surrender. - -Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment -when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda -packet: - -"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which -the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of -this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The -other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon -him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at -me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out -of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't -want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always -expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'" - -No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have -had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; -but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for -good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess -alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity -of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said -Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks -and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have -ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born -artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that -he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be -"original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship -even over his neckties--the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, -has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily! - -And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about -on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most -ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, -the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by -all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic -sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the -end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an -illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the -creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those -three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of -conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is -the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own -conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He -was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that -has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for -missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says -John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, -"who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of -things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the -end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability -begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new -turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces -of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confreres -have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask -yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and -walk the stage as poets do. - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42225.txt or 42225.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/2/2/42225/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Thus, we do not necessarily -keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. - - -Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: - - http://www.gutenberg.org - -This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, -including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary -Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to -subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/42225.zip b/42225.zip Binary files differdeleted file mode 100644 index fd82dc1..0000000 --- a/42225.zip +++ /dev/null diff --git a/old/42225-0.txt b/old/42225-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 41255c1..0000000 --- a/old/42225-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8316 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - -BY - -VAN WYCK BROOKS - - -"_Think it over, dear B--! A man's gifts are_ -_not a property: they are a duty."_ - ---IBSEN'S _Letters_ - - -1922 - -LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN - - - - -TO E.S.B. - - - - -CONTENTS - - - - I. INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - II. THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - III. THE GILDED AGE - IV. IN THE CRUCIBLE - V. THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - VI. EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - VII. THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - VIII. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - IX. MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - X. LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - XI. MUSTERED OUT - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - - - - -CHAPTER I - -INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - - - "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the - deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the - race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and - for the same reason."--_Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's - books._ - - -To those who are interested in American life and letters there has been -no question of greater significance, during the last few years, than the -pessimism of Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his own -friends and contemporaries were rather inclined to make light of his -oft-expressed belief that man is the meanest of the animals and life a -tragic mistake. - -For some time before his death Mark Twain had appeared before the public -in the rôle less of a laughing philosopher than of a somewhat gloomy -prophet of modern civilization. But he was old and he had suffered many -misfortunes and the progress of society is not a matter for any one to -be very jubilant about: to be gloomy about the world is a sort of -prerogative of those who have lived long and thought much. The public -that had grown old with him could hardly, therefore, accept at its face -value a point of view that seemed to be contradicted by so many of the -facts of Mark Twain's life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him -intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of -his "pose" regarding "the damned human race," and we know the opinion of -his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was "not a pessimist in his -heart, but only by premeditation." These views were apparently borne out -by his own testimony. "My temperament," he wrote, shortly after the -death of his daughter Jean, "has never allowed my spirits to remain -depressed long at a time." That he remained active and buoyant to the -end was, in fact, for his associates, sufficient evidence that his -philosophical despair was only an anomaly, which had no organic part in -the structure of his life. - -Was it not natural that they should feel thus about him, those -contemporaries of his, so few of whom had seen his later writings and -all the tell-tale private memoranda which Mr. Paine has lately given to -the world? What a charmed life was Mark Twain's, after all! To be able -to hold an immense nation in the hollow of one's hand, to be able to -pour out into millions of sympathetic ears, with calm confidence, as -into the ears of a faithful friend, all the private griefs and intimate -humors of a lifetime, to be called "the King" by those one loves, to be -so much more than a king in reality that every attack of gout one has is -"good for a column" in the newspapers and every phrase one utters -girdles the world in twenty minutes, to be addressed as "the Messiah of -a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents"--what -more could Tom Sawyer, at least, have wished than that? And Mark Twain's -fame was not merely one of sentiment. If the public heart was moved by -everything that concerned him,--an illness in his household, a new -campaign against political corruption, a change of residence, and he was -deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won -the world's pity when he got into debt and the world's praise when he -got out of it, he was no sort of nine days' wonder; his country had made -him its "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in -appointing himself, as he said, "ambassador-at-large of the United -States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all -official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over "The -Innocents Abroad" and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices -to the day when the newspapers were freely proposing that he ought to -have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the -Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first -time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and -private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and -his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his -opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a -sort of incarnation of the character and quality of modern America. -"Everywhere he moved," says Mr. Paine, "a world revolved about him." In -London, in Vienna, his apartments were a court, and traffic rules were -modified to let him pass in the street. A charmed life, surely, when we -consider, in addition to this public acclaim, the tidal waves of wealth -that flowed in upon him again and again, the intense happiness of his -family relations, and the splendid recognition of those fellow-members -of his craft whose word to him was final--Kipling, who "loved to think -of the great and godlike Clemens," and Brander Matthews, who freely -compared him with the greatest writers of history, and Bernard Shaw, who -announced that America had produced just two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe -and Mark Twain. Finally, there was Mr. Howells, "the recognized critical -Court of Last Resort in this country," as he called him. Did not Mr. -Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: "Your foundations -are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, -and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"? - -The spectators of this drama could hardly have been expected to take -the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously, and all the more because he -totally refuted the old and popular notion that humorists are always -melancholy. I have already quoted the remark he made about his -temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life, four months -before his own death. It is borne out by all the evidence of all his -years. He was certainly not one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue -natures, those June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day -long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He was an August nature, -given to sudden storms and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with -electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, -and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he -was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child -in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter -where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope -preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine -temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," -he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this -footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly _happy_ -than I am I defy the world to produce him and _prove_ him." And it seems -always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in his triumphs on the -platform or indulging his "rainbow-hued impulses" on paper, we see him -again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he was -expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress assembled, -"happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in -his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: -"Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know -my temperament"? - -And his physical health was just what one might expect from this, from -his immense vitality. He was subject to bronchial colds and he had -intermittent attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his health -appears to have been as perfect as his energy was inexhaustible. "I have -been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years," he writes -in 1875; from all one gathers he might have made the same statement -twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at fifty, at -sixty, at seventy--during that extraordinary period, well within the -memory of people who are still young, when he had solved his financial -difficulties by going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine says, -"like a debutante in her first season,"--the days when people called him -"the Belle of New York": "By half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had -danced all those people down--and yet was not tired, merely breathless. -I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at -work on this letter to you." And again, the next year, his sixtieth -year, when he had been playing billiards with H.H. Rogers, until Rogers -looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you ever get tired?": "I was -able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like. Don't you -remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the -villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I -get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one -daylight nap since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testimony -of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, during the last five -years of his life when, even at seventy-four, he was still playing -billiards "9 hours a day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human -being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a -young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the -night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh -and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He -smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the -billiard-table with the light step of youth. At 3 or 4 o'clock in the -morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my -weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of -his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least -suggestion of fatigue." - -Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his intimates, had ever -in their eyes,--this darling of all the gods. No wonder they were -inclined to take his view of "the damned human race" as rather a -whimsical pose; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it so even -if they had known, generally known, that he had a way of referring in -private to "God's most elegant invention" as not only "damned" but also -"mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are always supposed to be -that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about -the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an -abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to -explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its -stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and -Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment." -All his closest friends were accustomed to little notes like this: "I -have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing -that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and -hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put -in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race." -Might not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that? - -Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's writings which only a -succeeding generation can really have, it might be possible to explain -in this objective way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism -which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The change in tone -between the poetry of the first half of "Life on the Mississippi" and -the dull notation of the latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp -Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," -with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," -that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, -along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the -reader for taking his text at its face value--all this might be -attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and -family sorrow. If he was always manifesting, in word and deed, his deep -belief that life is inevitably a process of deterioration,--well, did -not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it not, is it not, a -popular American dogma that "the baddest children are better than the -goodest men"? A race of people who feel this way could not have thought -there was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims like these: - - If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he - will not bite you. This is the principal difference between - a dog and a man. - - It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to - hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other - to get the news to you. - -They could hardly have been surprised at the bitter, yes, even the -vindictive, mockery of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," at Mark -Twain's definition of man as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted -neither "to supply the coffee nor turn the crank," at his recurring -"plan" to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the -air for a period of two minutes. - -Has not the American public, with its invincible habit of "turning -hell's back-yard into a playground," gone so far even as to discount -"The Mysterious Stranger," that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole -of cruel nonsense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank -assertion that slavery, hypocrisy and cowardice are the eternal destiny -of man? Professor Stuart P. Sherman, who likes to defend the views of -thirty years ago and sometimes seems to forget that all traditions are -not of equal validity, says of this book that it "lets one into a -temperament and character of more gravity, complexity and interest than -the surfaces indicated." But having made this discovery, for he is -openly surprised, Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and -unexpected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had known before: "What -Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in monarchies, -aristocracies, tribal religions and--minorities bent on mischief, and -making a bludgeon of the malleable many." And, after all, he says, "the -wicked world visited by the mysterious stranger is sixteenth century -Austria--not these States." But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in -reality Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through -whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations of Huck Finn and Tom -Sawyer, those characters which, as we know from a hundred evidences, -haunted Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any rate, Mark -Twain's boys, and whoever compares their moral attitude with that of the -boys of Mark Twain's prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into -his soul. "We boys wanted to warn them"--Marget and Ursula, against the -danger that was gathering about them--"but we backed down when it came -to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor -brave enough to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get us into trouble." What, is this Mark Twain speaking, the -creator of Huck and Tom, who gladly broke every law of the tribe to -protect and rescue Nigger Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly enough nor -brave enough" to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get them into trouble? Can we, in the light of this, continue to -say that Mark Twain's pessimism was due to anything so external as the -hatred of tyranny, and a sixteenth century Austrian tyranny at that? Is -it not perfectly plain that that deep contempt for man, the -"coffee-mill," a contempt that has spread now even to the boy-nature of -which Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have had some -far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate -chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not -the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no -relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist: - - Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. - - All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange - complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to - live. - - Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all - his others--his last breath. - -And that paragraph about the death of his daughter, so utterly -inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes to himself: "My life is a -bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most -precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor ---death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to -life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; -and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions, to -one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that: but at least one of -them is that, not to the writer's apprehension, but in the writer's -experience, life has been in some special way a vain affliction. - -Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of Mark Twain's -pessimism? Can we attribute it, with Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt -under which he labored now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the -death of those he loved? No, for these things would have modified his -temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, -checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of -brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own -testimony, the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever knew, he -lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of life he had neither more -nor less than other men, and they affected him neither more nor less. To -say anything else would be to contradict the whole record of his -personality. - -No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted Mark Twain, a -malady common to many Americans, perhaps, if we are to judge from that -excessive interest in therapeutics which he shared with so many millions -of his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark Twain's later -history which has received too little attention. "Whether it was -copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice," -says Mr. Paine--to approach this subject on its broadest side--"he -rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would -provide physical or mental easement for his species." And here again the -general leads to the particular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender -heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts -of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he -and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near -losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in -their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that -momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor -Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method -that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles -about it, bombarding his friends with letters of appreciation and -recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave -most of his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea for all -human ills which osteopathy could not reach." There was Christian -Science to which, in spite of his attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat -equivocal book he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and -as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest converts," who -"never lost faith in its power." And lastly, there was the "eclectic -therapeutic doctrine" which he himself put together piecemeal from all -the others, to the final riddance of _materia medica_. - -We have seen what Mark Twain's apparent health was. Can we say that this -therapeutic obsession was due to the illnesses of his family, which -were, indeed, unending? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant -stimulus to the obsession--the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine," for -instance, did, quite definitely, rise up out of the midst of them. But -it is plain that there had to be an element of "soul-cure" in these -various healings for Mark Twain to be interested in them, that what -interested him in them _was_ the "soul-cure," the "mind-cure." Can he -say too much in praise of Christian Science for its "healing of the -spirit," its gift of "buoyant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from -care"? In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental healing -began at a time when he and his family alike were free from illness. It -is in 1886, when Mark Twain was at the very, summit of his fame, when he -was the most successful publisher in the world, when he was at work on -his most ambitious book, when he was "frightened," as he said, at the -proportions of his prosperity, when his household was aglow with -happiness and well-being, that his daughter Susy notes in her diary: -"Papa has been very much interested of late in the 'mind-cure' theory." -It might be added that he was about at the age when, according to his -famous aphorism, a man who does not become a pessimist knows too little -about life. - -In fact, the more one scans the later pages of Mark Twain's history the -more one is forced to the conclusion that there was something gravely -amiss with his inner life. There was that frequently noted fear of -solitude, that dread of being alone with himself which made him, for -example, beg for just one more game of billiards at 4 o'clock in the -morning. There were those "daily self-eludings" that led him to slay his -own conscience in one of the most ferocious of his humorous tales. That -conscience of his--what was it? Why do so many of his jokes turn upon an -affectation, let us say, of moral cowardice in himself? How does it -happen that when he reads "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him "with -force" is Tito's compromise with his conscience? Why those continual -fits of remorse, those fantastic self-accusations in which he charged -himself, we are told, with having filled Mrs. Clemens's life with -privations, in which he made himself responsible first for the death of -his younger brother and later for that of his daughter Susy, writing to -his wife, according to Mr. Paine, that he was "wholly and solely -responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality -his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-fall, the -separation from Susy, and this final, incredible disaster"? Was there -any reason why, humorously or otherwise, he should have spoken of -himself as a liar, why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of -writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I went on now and took -him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in -literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"? -That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made him come to think -of literature as primarily, perhaps, the confession of sins--was there -anything in the moral point of view of his generation to justify it, in -this greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business, this zealous -reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be -cheaply persuadable" was, he said, the first command the Deity ever -issued to a human being on this planet, the only command Adam would -never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin of one of his -books: "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep -and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he -despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same reason." - -A strange enigma! "You observe," wrote Mark Twain once, almost at the -beginning of his career, "that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." That -spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The restless -movement of his life, those continual journeys to Bermuda, where "the -deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and -give his conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an -autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible," which -would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt -alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense -relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of -limitations--you have served your term, well or less well, and you are -mustered out"--how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? -For Mark Twain was right--things do not happen by chance, and the -psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain -respects that other sort of determinism in which he so almost -fanatically believed. There is no figure for the human being like the -ship, he sometimes said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his -contemporaries, just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory -of that last English welcome, the _Begum_ of Bengal, stateliest of -Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it -merely an irony of circumstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of -storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea? - -No, there was a reason for Mark Twain's pessimism, a reason for that -chagrin, that fear of solitude, that tortured conscience, those -fantastic self-accusations, that indubitable self-contempt. It is an -established fact, if I am not mistaken, that these morbid feelings of -sin, which have no evident cause, are the result of having transgressed -some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one's nature. It is as old as -Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest -that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his -was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked -personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost -wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The -spirit of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from the -bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had never quite been -able to possess. - -Does this seem too rash a hypothesis? It is, I know, the general -impression that Mark Twain quite fully effectuated himself as a writer. -Mr. Howells called him the "Lincoln of our literature," Professor -William Lyon Phelps describes him as one of the supreme novelists of the -world, Professor Brander Matthews compares him with Cervantes, and -Bernard Shaw said to him once: "I am persuaded that the future historian -of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French -historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." These were views -current in Mark Twain's lifetime, and similar views are common enough -to-day. "Mark Twain," says Professor Archibald Henderson, "enjoys the -unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening -and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual -powers from the beginning to the end." To Mr. John Macy, author of what -is, on the whole, the most discerning book that has been written on our -literature, he is "a powerful, original thinker." And finally, Mr. H.L. -Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There -was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof -engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one -associates with the great artists of the Renaissance." An imposing array -of affirmations, surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few -years, during which he has become in a way so much more interesting, -have witnessed a singular change in Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly -present he is in the public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort -of archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not -continue so to be for many generations to comet Undoubtedly. By whom, -however, with the exception of two or three of his books, is he read? -Mr. Paine, I know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this day in -America in larger quantity than any other book of travel. But a number -of explanations might be given for this, as for any other mob -phenomenon, none of which has anything to do with literary fame in the -proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by the delight and -stimulus which he gives to mature spirits in the present, and time, it -seems to me, tends to bear out the assertion of Henry James that Mark -Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry Finn," -"Tom Sawyer," a story or two like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a -sketch or two like "Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of -"Life on the Mississippi,"--these, in any case, can already be said to -have "survived" all his other work. And are these writings, however -beautiful and important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic -genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes? -Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that prevails to-day when he -called their author the "divine amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" -and "Tom Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent, as -complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality." - -So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not -been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled -almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him? When -his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, they -were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they -had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a -creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his -prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of -his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique -magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot -help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American -writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like -Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if -intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth -to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his -associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian -would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the -horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of -one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what -Mr. Howells says: "Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities -that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final -personality was something exquisite." That combination of barbaric force -and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him--is there not -about it something portentous, something that suggests the true lord of -life? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic -atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were -the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their -impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one -of the fixed stars had fallen in space. - -This was the force, this the energy which, through Mark Twain's pen, -found such inadequate expression. He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a -"divine amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called -it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way -of saying, in the latter case, that his was a mind that had not -developed, and in the former, that his was a splendid genius which had -never found itself? - -It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own self-estimate. His -judgments were, as Mr. Paine says, "always unsafe": strictly speaking, -he never knew what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the -time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against -his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark -Twain's estimate of himself it is no conscious judgment of his career -one has in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the judgment of his -unconscious self. This he revealed unawares in all sorts of ways. - -There were times when he seemed to share the complacent confidence of so -many others in his immortal fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his -large, loose, easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live a -couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a -fresh start and live the rest of the time." And Mr. Paine says that as -early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers a -contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one -hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with -his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this -must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty -confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain -was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he -did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of -megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest -rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous -episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I -wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, -I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American -writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident -in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it became a -historic event: it was for him, plainly, of an exceptional significance, -and all his love for gorgeous trappings could never account for the -delight he had in that doctor's gown--"I would dress that way all the -time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine--which became for him a permanent -robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain at seventy-two, one of the most -celebrated men in the world, could not have cared so much for it if it -had been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must have served -in some way also to vindicate him in his own eyes; he seized upon it as -a sort of talisman, as a reassurance from what he considered the highest -court of culture, that he really was one of the elect. - -Yes, that naïve passion for the limelight, for "walking with kings" and -hobnobbing with job lots of celebrities, that "revelling," as Mr. Paine -calls it, "in the universal tribute"--what was its root if not a deep -sense of insecurity, a desire for approval both in his own eyes and in -the eyes of all the world? During those later years in New York, when he -had become so much the professional celebrity, he always timed his -Sunday morning walks on Fifth Avenue for about the hour when the -churches were out. Mr. Paine tells how, on the first Sunday morning, he -thoughtlessly suggested that they should turn away at Fifty-ninth Street -in order to avoid the throng and that Clemens quietly remarked, "I like -the throng." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the Plaza Hotel until -the appointed hour.... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid -the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on -which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was -lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the -multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as -the tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for approval and -corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a -quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted -his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"? -Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obsession: kings, -empresses, princes, archduchesses--what a part they play in his -biography! He is always dragging them in, into his stories, into his -letters, writing about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them, -and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals they have. And as -with kings, so also with great men, or men who were considered great, or -men who were merely notorious. He makes lists of those he has known, -those he has spent evenings with--Mark Twain, to whom celebrity was the -cheapest thing going! Is there not in all this the suggestion of an -almost conscious weakness clutching at strength, the suggestion of some -kind of failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of success? - -Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this same desire for -approval, for corroboration. Mark Twain was supported by the sentiment -of the majority, which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he had -the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the arbiter of all the -elegances; he had virtually the freedom of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and -not only its freedom but a higher rate of payment than any other -_Atlantic_ contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more -reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as -good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells -in 1887, "but I've always done what I could to secure and enlarge my -good opinion of it. I've always said to, myself, 'Everybody reads it and -that's something--it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable -people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by -implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and -fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, -high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody -likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a -note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the -sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, -beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He -rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an -uplifter of the masses; then, with a touch of mock-noble indignation, he -confesses to being a popular entertainer, fully convinced at least that -there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed -to put upon his book an explanatory line: "This is written for the -Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the Members." No plea more -grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great -reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant -of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a -separation between the "Head" and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, -had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for -the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it. - -Mark Twain, in short, knew very well--for I think these illustrations -prove it--that there was something decidedly different between himself -and a great writer. In that undifferentiated mob of celebrities, great, -and less great, and far from great, amid which he moved for a -generation, he was a favored equal. But in the intimate presence of some -isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the -candidate for the mystagogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow -writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude. Was it Browning? -He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied -for a time with the naïve self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen? -Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin note-books: "Been taken -for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was -found the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses the word -"literature" in connection with his own work it is with a sudden -self-consciousness that lets one into the secret of his inner humility. -"I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever -been given a degree by any college in any age of the world, so far as I -know," he writes to the authorities of Yale in 1888. A man who freely -compared himself with the melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, -who, in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins," invited his readers, -who already knew how "the born and trained novelist works," to see how -the "jack-leg" does it, could never have been accused of not knowing his -true rank. "You and I are but sewing-machines," he says in "What Is -Man?" "We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care -nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out -Gobelins." - -I think we are in a position now to understand that boundless comic -impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic impudence which led him to propose -to Edwin Booth in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him to -telegraph to W.T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to -disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now"; which -led him, at the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum, "Why am -I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was -just asking for information." Tempting Providence, was he not, this -child of good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the fates. If -he had not had a certain sense of colossal force, it would never have -occurred to him, however humorously, to place himself on an equality -with Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the Czar and his -magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean. But, on the other hand, it -would never have occurred to him to make these comparisons if he had -felt himself in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are not -only great in energy but masters of themselves let their work speak for -them; men who are not masters of themselves, whose energy, however -great, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are -driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration -from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured -that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare -and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great -fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet -they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure -themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, -therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually -was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which -had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy -that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply -of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable -abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined -with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the -barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of -that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes -one's sole criterion the magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, -ever more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life Mark Twain -was attended by what Mr. Paine calls "psychic evidences"; he never fails -to note the marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is -always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"--he -invented the phrase; strange phenomena of nature rise up in his path. -Three times, while crossing the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each -time he takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the barbarian -conquerors of antiquity, I say, those essential opposites of the -creative spirit, whose control is altogether internal, and who feels -himself the master of his own fate, could have been more in character -than was Mark Twain when he observed, a few months before his death: "I -came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I -expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my -life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no -doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable; freaks, they came in -together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." - -A comet, this time! And a few pages back we found him comparing himself -with a sewing-machine. Which is he, one, or the other, or both? He seems -to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of -extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty -solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, -confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed -to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains. A great -genius, in short, that has never attained the inner control which makes -genius great, a mind that has not found itself, a mind that does not -know itself, a spirit that cloaks to the end in the fantasy of its -temporal power the tragic reality of its own essential miscarriage! - -We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret of Mark Twain's -mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy of that little book which he -called his "Bible," "What Is Man?" He was extremely proud of the -structure of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a machine, -"moved, directed, commanded by _exterior_ influences, _solely_," that he -is "a chameleon, who takes the color of his place of resort," that he is -"a mere coffee-mill," which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee -nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of proprietary interest and -pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he -says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving -impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--and is merely a machine and -entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly -possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in -patching and painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession -and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging -fact approaches." You see how it pleases him, how much it means to him, -that final "Truth," how he clings to it with a sort of defiant insolence -against the "imploring argument," the "damaging fact"? "Man originates -nothing," he says, "not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. -He was a machine, and machines do not create." Faith never gave the -believer more comfort than this philosophy gave Mark Twain. - -But is it possible for a creative mind to find "contentment" in denying -the possibility of creation? And why should any one find pride and -satisfaction in the belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the -denial of "free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and the sour -grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and tragic souls who find -comfort in saying that love exists nowhere in the world because they -themselves have missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark -Twain any pleasure to feel that he was "entitled to no personal merit" -for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he -felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of -feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to -achieve--namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, -"Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the -world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the -creative life is the very embodiment of it--the emergence, that is to -say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant, integrating -principle that turns the world he confronts into a mere instrument for -the registration of his own preferences. There is but one -interpretation, consequently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight -in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine: it brought him -comfort to feel that if he was, as he said, a "sewing-machine," it was -the doing of destiny, and that nothing he could have done himself would -have enabled him to "turn out Gobelins." - -From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that Mark Twain was a -frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development, and beyond this -fact, as we know from innumerable instances the psychologists have -placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of -his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even been -turned, as we shall see; against himself; the poet, the artist in him, -consequently, had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a -spiritual valetudinarian. - -But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to glance not only -at Mark Twain's life and work, but also at the epoch and the society in -which he lived. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - - "One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is - dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, - but they are essentially not happy," - - STENDHAL: _On Love in the United States_. - - -In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, -revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather -material for his book, "Life on the Mississippi." It was, naturally, a -profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what -his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an -assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot -of the steamer _Gold Dust_ recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the -pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We -got to be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most of my -time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a -big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of -the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her -most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me -there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been -no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a -pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." - -Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant, that Mark Twain -recorded in these words, a regret for the passing of time and the charm -and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his -"literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not altogether flattering -to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to -ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely "happy and -care-free" a man of Mark Twain's energy and power could hardly, in later -life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he certainly did: all his -days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a -lost paradise. "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done -in my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am a person," he -wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, "who would quit authorizing in a minute to -go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we -see; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, -that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only -by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact -that the earlier pages of "Life on the Mississippi," in which he -pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and -expressive that he ever wrote. - -It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong hankering for the -lost paradise of the pilot-house. It was something more organic, and -Mark Twain provides us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my -subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his book, "it is no -surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have -followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it." A singular -statement for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life, the -two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are nothing else than love -and pride! But Mark Twain writes those words with an almost unctuous -gravity of conviction, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a -pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had -not experienced it in literature. Strange as that may seem, we cannot -question it; we have, simply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi -pilot had, in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist in -him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in him had never been -satisfied again. We do not have to look beyond this in order to -interpret, if not the fact, at least the obsession. He felt that, in -some way, he had been as a pilot on the right track; and he felt that he -had lost this track. If he was always harking back to that moment, then, -it was, we can hardly escape feeling, with a vague hope of finding again -some scent that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious thread -of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it possible that he had, in -fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that -career? It is a bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark -Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to see first what sort -of boy he was, and what sort of society it was he grew up in; then we -shall be able to understand what unique opportunities for personal -growth the career of a pilot afforded him. - -What a social setting it was, that little world into which Mark Twain -was born! It was drab, it was tragic. In "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom -Sawyer" we see it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a -later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled in Hannibal, on -the Mississippi. He was five at the time; his eyes had opened on such a -scene as we find in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary, -discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he -says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, -desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, -wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in -some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"--it is the epic not only -of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. -How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the -scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E.H. Howe's "Story -of a Country Town," for instance, that Western counterpart in sodden -misery of "Ethan Frome"--a book which has only begun to find its public. -This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest, tells us in so -many words that in all his early days he never saw a woman who was not -anæmic and fretful, a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who -was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment. No wonder he has -come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is -no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain -himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, -dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and -foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, -some gigantic garbage-can! Human nature was not responsible for this -debris of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could human nature -rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and murder," we are told, were the -diversions of the capital city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. -It was not very different in normal times along the Mississippi. -Hannibal was a small place; yet Mr. Paine records four separate murders -which Mark Twain actually witnessed as a boy: every week he would see -some drunken ruffian run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, -he saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many gruesome -experiences," exclaims Mr. Paine, "there appear to have been in those -early days!" But let us be moderate: every one was not violent. As for -the majority of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that history -calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion, justice will never be -realistic. The gods of Greece would have gone unwashed and turned gray -at forty and lost their digestion and neglected their children if they -had been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into an irritable -silence. - -A desert of human sand!--the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, -for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions -after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his -letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a -dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities -may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of -existence inevitably droop and wither." - -Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his -mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of -Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with -John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain -"did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are -told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he -seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a -perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of -his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon -him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking -"sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. -Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent -medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals--we have it from "Tom -Sawyer"--"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were -all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, -desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, -without enough power, grating on their own metal. - -Little Sam, as every one called him, was the fifth child in this -household, "a puny baby with a wavering promise of life"; it is -suggested that he was not wanted. Mr. Paine speaks of him somewhere as -"high-strung and neurotic." We are not surprised, therefore, to find him -at three and four "a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies -that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a -series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as -he lay rolling in the grass." This is the child who is to retain through -life that exquisite sensibility of which so many observers have spoken. -"Once when I met him in the country," says Mr. Howells, for example, of -his later life, "he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in -bringing down a blackbird; and he described the poor, stricken, glossy -thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as -he might have given a wounded child." Already, in his infancy, his -gentle, winning manner and smile make him every one's favorite. A very -special little flower of life, you see, capable of such feeling that at -twenty-three his hair is to turn gray in the tragic experience of his -brother's death. A flower of life, a wild flower, and infinitely -fragile: the doctor is always being called in his behalf. Before he -grows up he is to have prophetic dreams, but now another neurotic -symptom manifests itself. In times of family crisis, at four, when one -of his sisters is dying, at twelve, after the death of his father, he -walks in his sleep: often the rest of the household get up in the middle -of the night to find this delicate little waif with his eyes shut -"fretting with cold in some dark corner." - -Can we not already see in this child the born, predestined artist? And -what sort of nurture will his imagination have? He is abandoned to the -fervid influences of the negro slaves,--for his father had moments of a -relative prosperity. Crouching in their cabins, he drinks in wild, weird -tales of blood-curdling African witchcraft. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, -"an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination -of a delicate child." One thinks indeed of an image that would have -pleased Heine, the image of a frail snow-plant of the North quivering, -flaming in the furnace of the jungle. Mark Twain appears to have been -from the outset a center of interest, radiating a singular potency; and -the more his spirit was subjected to such a fearful stimulus the more -urgently he required for his normal development the calm, clairvoyant -guidance a pioneer child could never have had. The negroes were "in real -charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment." What other -influence was there to counter-balance this? - -One, and one only, an influence tragic in its ultimate consequences, the -influence of Mark Twain's mother. That poor, taciturn, sunstruck -failure, John Clemens, was a mere pathetic shadow beside the woman whose -portrait Mark Twain has drawn for us in the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer." -She who was regarded as a "character" by all the town, who was said to -have been "the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best -dancer, in all Kentucky," who was still able to dance at 80, and lived -to be 87, who belonged, in short, to "the long-lived, energetic side of -the house," directed her children, we are told--and we can believe -it--"with considerable firmness." And what was the inevitable -relationship between her and this little boy? "She had a weakness," says -Mr. Paine, "for the child that demanded most of her mother's care.... -All were tractable and growing in grace but little Sam ... a delicate -little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed." In -later life, "you gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she told -him. In fact, she was always scolding him, comforting him, forgiving -him, punishing and pleading with him, fixing her attention upon him, -exercising her emotions about him, impressing it upon his mind for all -time, as we shall come to see that woman is the inevitable seat of -authority and the fount of wisdom. - -We know that such excessive influences are apt to deflect the growth of -any spirit. Men are like planets in this, that for them to sail clear in -their own orbits the forces of gravity have to be disposed with a -certain balance on all sides: how often, when the father counts for -nothing, a child becomes the satellite of its mother, especially when -that mother's love has not found its normal expression in her own youth! -We have seen that Mark Twain's mother did not love her husband; that her -capacity for love, however, was very great is proved by the singular -story revealed in one of Mark Twain's letters: more than sixty years -after she had quarreled with that young Lexington doctor, and when her -husband had long been dead, she, a woman of eighty or more, took a -railway journey to a distant city where there was an Old Settlers' -convention because among the names of those who were to attend it she -had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. "Who could have imagined -such a heart-break as that?" said Mr. Howells, when he heard the story. -"Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no -more noise than a grave under foot." It made no noise, but it -undoubtedly had a prodigious effect upon Mark Twain's life. When an -affection as intense as that is balked in its direct path and repressed -it usually, as we know, finds an indirect outlet; and it is plain that -the woman as well as the mother expressed itself in the passionate -attachment of Jane Clemens to her son. We shall note many consequences -of this fact as we go on with our story. We can say at least at this -point that Mark Twain was, quite definitely, in his mother's -leading-strings. - -What was the inevitable result? I have said, not, I hope, with too much -presumption, that Mark Twain had already shown himself the born, -predestined artist, that his whole nature manifested what is called a -tendency toward the creative life. For that tendency to become -conscious, to become purposive, two things were necessary: it must be -able, in the first place, to assert itself and in the second place to -embody itself in a vocation; to realize itself and then to educate -itself, to realize itself in educating itself. And, as we know, the -influences of early childhood are, in these matters, vitally important. -If Jane Clemens had been a woman of wide experience and independent -mind, in proportion to the strength of her character, Mark Twain's -career might have been wholly different. Had she been catholic in her -sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no matter how more than -maternal her attachment to her son was, she might have placed before him -and encouraged him to pursue interests and activities amid which he -could eventually have recovered his balance, reduced the filial bond to -its normal measure and stood on his own feet. But that is to wish for a -type of woman our old pioneer society could never have produced. We are -told that the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer" is a speaking portrait of Jane -Clemens, and Aunt Polly, as we know, was the symbol of all the taboos. -The stronger her will was, the more comprehensive were her repressions, -the more certainly she became the inflexible guardian of tradition in a -social régime where tradition was inalterably opposed to every sort of -personal deviation from the accepted type. "In their remoteness from -'the political centers of the young Republic," says Mr. Howells, in "The -Leatherwood God," of these old Middle Western settlements, "they seldom -spoke of the civic; questions stirring the towns of the East; the -commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were; -unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest." And in the slave -States it was not the abolitionist alone whose name was held, as Mr. -Paine says, "in horror," but every one who had the audacity to think -differently from his neighbors. Jane Clemens, in short, was the -embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism which had proved -so favorable to the life of enterprising action but which perceived the -scent of the devil in any least expression of what is now known as the -creative impulse. She had a kind heart, she was always repenting and -softening and forgiving; it is said that whenever she had to drown -kittens, she warmed the water first. But this, without opening any -channel in a contrary direction, only sealed her authority! She won her -points as much by kindness as by law. Besides, tradition spoke first in -her mind; her hand was quicker than her heart; in action she was the -madonna of the hairbrush. And what, specifically, was it that she -punished? Those furtive dealings of Huck and Tom with whitewash and -piracy were nothing in the world--and that is why all the world loves -them--but the first stirrings of the normal æsthetic sense, the first -stirrings of individuality. - -Already I think we divine what was bound to happen in the soul of Mark -Twain. The story of "Huckleberry Finn" turns, as we remember, upon a -conflict: "the author," says Mr. Paine, "makes Huck's struggle a -psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and -sympathy on the other." In the famous episode of Nigger Jim, "sympathy," -the cause of individual freedom, wins. Years later, in "The Mysterious -Stranger," Mark Twain presented the parallel situation we noted in the -last chapter: "we found," says the boy who tells that story, "that we -were not manly enough, nor brave enough to do a generous action when -there was a chance that it could get us into trouble." Conscience and -the law, we see, had long since prevailed in the spirit of Mark Twain, -but what is the conscience of a boy who checks a humane impulse but "boy -terror," as Mr. Paine calls it, an instinctive fear of custom, of tribal -authority? The conflict in "Huckleberry Finn" is simply the conflict of -Mark Twain's own childhood. He solved it successfully, he fulfilled his -desire, in the book, as an author can. In actual life he did not solve -it at all; he surrendered. - -Turn to the record in Mr. Paine's biography. We find Mark Twain in -perpetual revolt against all those institutions for which his mother -stood. "Church ain't worth shucks," says Tom Sawyer. As for school, "he -never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and -remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything -resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of -liberty." One recalls what Huck said of Aunt Polly just before he made -his escape to the woods: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she - won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air get through 'em somehow, and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - -But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally or in any other -way. He never even imagined that his feelings of revolt had any -justification. We remember how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some -escapade, they would resolve to "lead a better life" to go to church, -visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and subsist wholly upon -tracts. That was what Mark Twain did: "not to do so," says, Mr. Paine, -"was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were -heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that." -And his mother was so strong, so courageous, the only strong and -courageous influence he knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he -set them down"--the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and -beaten and sold--"as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a -taste for a better life." Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence -himself, not to play with freedom! "He felt that it was his own -conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's -idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions." Naturally! And -she "punished him and pleaded with him, alternately"--with one -inevitable result. "'To fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote -to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly described that old feeling which -I used to have"; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a -preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be -damned." Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and -preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had -become in his eyes the "bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to -mention the creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"? - -Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and -flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. -Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other -traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities--how can we compare -the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, -horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell -of his infancy and find a vocation there? Calvinism itself had gone to -seed: it was nothing but the dead hand of custom; the flaming priest had -long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he -could find nowhere, either in men or in books, the bread and wine of the -spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, -Frank Burrough, who had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is -record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named -Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincinnati. "They were long fermenting -discourses," Mr. Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to -that winter in Macfarlane's room." And what was the counsel which, from -that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received?--that "man's -heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only -animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness" and that his -intellect was only a "depraving addition to him which, in the end, -placed him in a rank far below the other beasts." Propitious words for -this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with -books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is a memorable picture of the -library in the typical gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to -New Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering," "Affection's -Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa," "Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's -Book," "piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an -inherited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the cultural -background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh -stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the -foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark -Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, -which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half -a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. -"It gave him his cue," says Mr. Paine, "the first word of a part in the -human drama," and he conceived a sudden interest in history and -languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the -least protection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of -fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke. - -In all his environment, then, we see, there was nothing to assist in the -transformation of an unconscious artistic instinct, however urgent, into -a conscious artistic purpose. "Dahomey," wrote Mark Twain once, "could -not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. -Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not -itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of -stimulating exterior circumstances." He was reciting his own story in -those words. But the circumstances that surrounded Mark Twain were not -merely passively unfavorable to his own self-discovery; they were -actively, overwhelmingly unfavorable. He was in his mother's -leading-strings, and in his mother's eyes any sort of personal -self-assertion in choices, preferences, impulses was, literally, sinful. -Thus the whole weight of the Calvinistic tradition was concentrated -against him at his most vulnerable point. His mother, whom he could not -gainsay, was unconsciously but inflexibly set against his genius; and -destiny, which always fights on the side of the heaviest artillery, -delivered, in his twelfth year, a stroke that sealed her victory. - -Mark Twain's father died. Let Mr. Paine picture the scene: - -"The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with -him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, -indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred -things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the -knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother -took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. 'It -is all right, Sammy,' she said. 'What's done is done, and it does not -matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to -promise me----.' He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung -himself into her arms. 'I will promise anything,' he sobbed, 'if you -won't make me go to school! Anything!' His mother held him for a moment, -thinking, then she said: 'No, Sammy, you need not go to school any more. -Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.' So -he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like -his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and -justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious -matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held -sacred. That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to -somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping -together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous -at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, -they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid -on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A -thought struck Mrs. Clemens: 'Sam!' she said. He answered, but he was -sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet -around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in -succession after that. Then he slept more soundly." - -Who is sufficiently the master of signs and portents to read this -terrible episode aright? One thing, however, we feel with irresistible -certitude, that Mark Twain's fate was once for all decided there. That -hour by his father's corpse, that solemn oath, that walking in his -sleep--we must hazard some interpretation of it all, and I think we are -justified in hazarding as most likely that which explains the most -numerous and the most significant phenomena of his later life. - -To a hypersensitive child such as Mark Twain was at eleven that -ceremonious confrontation with his father's corpse must, in the first -place, have brought a profound nervous shock. Already, we are told, he -was "broken down" by his father's death; remorse had "laid a heavy hand -on him." But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? -"A hundred things in themselves trifling," which had offended, in -reality, not his father's heart but his father's will as a conventional -citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. -Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings out of this moody child, the -first wavering steps of the soul, that is what they have really been, -these peccadillos, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings -of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed; all those -crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, -are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of -that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, -with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meager traditions. -He is to go forth the Good Boy by _force majeure_, he is to become such -a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his -father's failure, to recover the lost gentility of a family that had -once been proud, to realize that "mirage of wealth" that had ever hung -before his father's eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly -with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to -remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and -all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any -fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away -childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always -a child, your mother's child! In a day to come you will write to one of -your friends, "We have no _real_ morals, but only artificial -ones--morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural -and healthy instincts." Never mind that now; your mother imagines her -heart is in the balance--will you break it?... Will you promise?... And -the little boy, in the terror of that presence, sobs: "Anything!" - -"There is in every man," said Sainte-Beuve, "a poet who dies young." In -truth, the poet does not die; he falls into a fitful trance. It is -perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment: he became, -and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism is the proof of it, a -dual personality. If I were sufficiently hardy, as I am not, I should -say that that little sleep-walker who appeared at Jane Clemens's bedside -on the night of her husband's funeral was the spirit of Tom Sawyer, come -to demand again the possession of his own soul, to revoke that ruthless -promise he had given. He came for several nights, and then, we are told, -the little boy slept more soundly, a sign, one might say, if one were a -fortune-teller, that he had grown accustomed to the new and difficult -rôle of being two people at once! The subject of dual personality was -always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to -his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, -susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown -from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation -of consciousness. His "wish" to be an artist, which has been so frowned -upon and has encountered such an insurmountable obstacle in the -disapproval of his mother, is now repressed, more or less definitely, -and another wish, that of winning approval, which inclines him to -conform with public opinion, has supplanted it. The individual, in -short, has given way to the type. The struggle between these two selves, -these two tendencies, these two wishes or groups of wishes, will -continue throughout Mark Twain's life, and the poet, the artist, the -individual, will make a brave effort to survive. From the death of his -father onward, however, his will is definitely enlisted on the side -opposed to his essential instinct. - -When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on his first excursion -into the great world, he gladly takes the oath, which his mother -administers, "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is -away, an oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do what -seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has -become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey -of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. -Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record -shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was -twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East -as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter journey lasted -more than a year; one might have expected it to open before him an -immense horizon; yet he seems, to judge from his published letters to -have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts or feelings of -youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of aspiration, of hope, depression, -joy, even ambition! His letters are as full of statistics as the -travel-reports of an engineer, and the only sensation he seems to -experience is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no wish -to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He is, in fact, under a -spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits himself, even from seeking on his -own account that vital experience which is the stuff of the creative -life. - -Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He hears "the old call of -the river." He becomes a pilot. - -Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon -this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the -world was to know later--"dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to -details"--should ever have persisted in acquiring the "absolutely -limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that -Mark Twain "loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and -not only the river, but a steamboat; and still more, perhaps, the -freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine omits one -important particular. We have seen that in Mark Twain two opposed groups -of wishes--the wish to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's -approval, to stand in with pioneer society--were struggling for -survival. When we turn to his account of the Mississippi pilots, their -life, their activities, their social position, we can see that in this -career both these wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in -the first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative occupation; -besides this, of all the pioneer types of the Mississippi region, the -pilot alone embodied in any large measure the characteristics of the -artist: in him alone these characteristics were permitted, in him they -were actually encouraged, to survive. - -We cannot understand why this was so without bearing in mind a -peculiarity of the pioneer régime upon which we shall have occasion more -than once to dwell. Mr. Herbert Croly has described it in "The Promise -of American Life." "In such a society," says Mr. Croly, "a man who -persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting -standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His -finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than -did the current careless and hasty product and his higher standards and -peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of -his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which -naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and -uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that -the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a -special vocation and high standards of achievement. Such a man did -insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under -the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value. -Consequently, they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with -special vocations." - -Here, of course, we have what is by far the most important fact to be -considered in any study of the creative life in the West; as we shall -see, Mark Twain remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own -view of the "special vocation" of literature. What is to be noted now is -that the pilot was an exception, and the only exception in the -Mississippi region, to this general social law. In Nevada, in -California, where Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin -his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system described by Mr. -Croly reigned in its most extreme and uncompromising form; every one had -to be a jack-of-all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The -entire welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the -Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before the war, upon -the expert skill of the pilot; for the river traffic to be secure at -all, he alone, but he at least, had to be a craftsman, a specialist of -the very highest order. There were no signal-lights along the shore, we -are told; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars; the pilot -had to know every bank and dead tree and reef, every cut-off and -current, every depth of water, by day and by night, in the whole stretch -of twelve hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he had to -"smell danger in the dark and read the surface of the water as an open -page." Upon his mastery of that "supreme science," as it was called, -hung all the civilization of the river folk, their trade, their -intercourse with the great centers, everything that stirred them out of -the inevitable stagnation of an isolated village existence. The pilot -was, consequently, in every sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a -"sovereign." Not only did he receive commands from nobody but he was -authorized to resent even the merest suggestion. "I have seen a boy of -eighteen," Mark Twain tells us, "taking a great steamer serenely into -what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing -mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere." Pilots -were, he says, "treated with marked deference by all, officers and -servants and passengers," and he adds naïvely: "I think pilots were -about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, -embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes." Above all, -and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of -experience in American society, recurs with most significant emphasis, -the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that -highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole -condition without which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. -"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the -only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the -earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people -... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... writers of all kinds are -manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but -then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and -child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day -I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." - -Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a -sort of channel for all the æsthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? -"When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent -ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a -steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were -only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and -material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: -repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for -a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can -hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, -to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating -enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean--first rate, for once! not -second, or third, or fourth--light and bright and gay, radiating a sort -of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, -its trim vigor. And what an air they had of _going_ somewhere, of -_getting_ somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit -of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! -Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of -mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And -the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any -menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and -their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the -fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great -master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that -of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural -passion of the novice lavished, for love of the _métier_, upon the only -creative--shall I say?--at least the only purposive figure in all his -experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the -Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It -was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. -"You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. -I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, -kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what -couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric -magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the -visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the -United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is -unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure æsthetic emotion, produced by a -supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship. - -Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said -in later life, when he used to assert so passionately that man is a mere -chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of -his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and -dictatorship of Circumstance.... Then Circumstance arrived with another -turning-point of my life--a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of -a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became -a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and -out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many -other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other assertion that to -be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts -had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and -respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct -to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited -an enthusiastic interest in craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a -neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;" -"he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required -intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those -printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, -therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the -training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark -Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted -to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to -submit to at any later period of his life. - -In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful -compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his -apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his -apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five -hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his -tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, -unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, -how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": -"even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," -says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament -could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is -to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a -career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, -initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum -all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, -"and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, -if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and -worship it! I want a man to--I want _you_ to--take up a line of action, -and _follow_ it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain -who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man -in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the -book, "I guess this is where our line starts"? - -Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that -shiftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for -dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of -his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, -if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, -meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of -existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing -with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to -have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I -used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things -got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can -trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and -another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, -who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing -down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. -Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the -life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to -study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. -Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books -and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots," -says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, -travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an -education as well as an entertainment to know." - -Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life" -is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was--as -it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you -were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the -world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside -from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and -straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of -some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates -what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle -or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, -application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, -determined spirit." - -It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile sentiment: it is -the emotion of a man who feels himself in the center of the road of his -own destiny. - - - - -CHAPTER III - -THE GILDED AGE - - - "The American democracy follows its ascending march, - uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as - the decrees of eternity." - - GEORGE BANCROFT. - - -You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, -feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim -labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an -artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent -nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp -schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted -with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in -fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in -fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, -for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river." - -Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him -for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as -the streets of London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia -served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will -it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great -writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound -personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the -mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread -in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind -with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits -of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, -he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has -his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circumstance -steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost. - -The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever -to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's -career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative -education, came to an abrupt end. - -Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change -instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to -him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that -exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in -the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that -he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a -military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The -whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with -which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it -does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility, -in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of -twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river -"sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and -purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that -amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and -there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on -the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had -thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and -'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark -Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the -characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile -frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over -his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was -fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a -little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become -organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would -never, in later years, have been led to assert so passionately that man -is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of -self-determination, was so new to this man who had passed his whole -adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent, -chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, -that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back -into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the -one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four -years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship: nothing -stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation. - -A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing -himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the -Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of -the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and -follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book -eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with -a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in -his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and -after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and -scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a -contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have -struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; -that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who -could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution -his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly -yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he -is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the -compulsions of his childhood. - - * * * * * - -But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall -have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about -[the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was -Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance -now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of -his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself. - -What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the -midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties -and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the -beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an -indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the -war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, -as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when -presidents were business men and generals were business men and -preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the -American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of -the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was -virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career -of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was -certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested -public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. -Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he -was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his -Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole -field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I -fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest -field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, -by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his -epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can -see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, -science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I -would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to -have accumulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was -offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into -the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to -burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the -John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than -be Historian or General or President." - -Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have -offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that -of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one -channel passed all the religious fervor of the race. - -I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, -artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works -often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a -story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called -the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love -with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to -make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes -West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and -again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had -made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the -tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would -strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it -then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to -him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was -all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he -persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or -four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I -_must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip -fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am -conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I -will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with -fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when -the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! -"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of -consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were -all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a -golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid -wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and -the Gilded Age is justified in its children. - -Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our -civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the -stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national -epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of -money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious -character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify -that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure -in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of -discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" -consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long -for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence -to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for -it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of -"another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the -mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious -zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in -the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor -of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are -repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has -become the prophet. - -We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to -Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit -of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration -of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and -Letters of John Hay": - - That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on - your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a - judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your - improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not - be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This - summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not - pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The - property you own--be it a tiny cottage or a palace--means so - much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up - whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an - attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization. - -Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances -that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are -the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not -by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in -material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up" -with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, -of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and -most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that -can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the -history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, -and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of -letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the -will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he -was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers -and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the -imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, -therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence -upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own -normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal -culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: -"Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor -and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with -occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the -bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here -one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality -of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything -was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in -his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very -disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be -acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and -notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be -tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he -not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, -and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, -debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what -is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, -for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the -other stars. - -We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we -realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War -were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought -were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, -in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity -of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the -West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success, -that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit -of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have -survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they -would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it -they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they -encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of -adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was -not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the -possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay -before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and -the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up -some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great -rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a -race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through -private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the -group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American -nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation -to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady -welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also -serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests -were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult. - -It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute homogeneity of -feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous folk before the Civil War and the -practical effect of pioneering and the business régime was to keep us -so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the -homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated -it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The -effect of business upon the individual has never been better described -than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I have known, and known -tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men--'big' financially--men -famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do -not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to -meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them -associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A -set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially -unattractive and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has -explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is -as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a -system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his -individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is -determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby -usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or -any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men -are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have -a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities -are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value -of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such -is the result of the business process, and the success of the process -required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually -automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality -significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has -drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the -collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the -collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than -the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere -assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is -called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality, -the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical, -realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly -says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the -man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact, -one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs -and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd. - -For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that -were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to -romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in -feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out -their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the -hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as -one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the -pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed? -Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform -dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an -anæsthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, -without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their -enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for -themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One -recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual -motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its -inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that -buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him -wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated -with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction -between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of -the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the -Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and -half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy -clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a -feudal castle, his wife is a châteleine, his children the baron's cubs, -and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the -broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable -blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the -promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of -his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him -the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the -material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason -and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of -reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these -illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the -story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim -Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to -whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends -used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green -plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums, -"California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one -eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had -to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting, -aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding -sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, -boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the -others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided -him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, -and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the -luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the -romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same -over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names -as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that -made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious -pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to -"boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain -parts of the West. - -Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would -not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the -country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of -criticism, in fact, was regarded as _lèse-majesté_ to the folk-spirit of -America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell -the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and -reputation. Who does not remember the story of Dickens's connection -with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil -Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less -attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an -agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and -defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded -as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no -intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong -emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad -and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was -regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was -obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of -actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, -becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant -than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge -Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' -Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll," -says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in -society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, -and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own -notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short, -entitled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary, -that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves -superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If -you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of -your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and -warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent. - -As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America -against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in -England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating -forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse -of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic -prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and -humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name -of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic -industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of -the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins -and the Morrises--in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly -untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar -destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the -state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of -1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While -the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined -place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and -fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, -and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed -that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism -they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were -the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to -victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant." - -Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, -even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the -individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the -human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil -War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or -less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the -rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, -had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were -stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a -natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, -had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories. - -In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the -gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those -days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand _young_ -men--not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, -muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and -royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and -magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious -ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans--none but -erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was -a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths -stayed at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers." -Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature -itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and -calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of -the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order -to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening -space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not -to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the -future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who -were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the -towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of -story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the -life of this New England countryside during the generation that -followed--those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants -of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population -only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What -a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!--a -civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death. -Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation -as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those -manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the -generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole -spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a -neurotic anæmia in which it has remained so largely to this day. - -This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of -its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the -unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the -fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. -Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper -in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it -was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them -high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they -were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure -shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, -just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's -unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the -winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an -extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the -less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had -gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had -not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed -them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like -Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in -Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the -stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American -past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the -conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was -not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright -light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left -behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men -westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and -the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her -complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had -become the pacemaker in the arts. - -One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new -régime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England -that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to -carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien -editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, was consecrated to the high priesthood -by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, -already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly -appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a -young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he -resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life--an -incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his -prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own -unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America -anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. -His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an -essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his -superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed -him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative -reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all -masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured -point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate -any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his -position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what -Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, -from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and -submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and -formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide -the notion of the artist's rôle through which he had found his own -salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the -religious, moral and social taboos of the time. - -I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy -actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now -that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply -played into the hands of the business régime? The taboos of the one -supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of -both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring -as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, -disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the -fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled -Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who -possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what -necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that -drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during -the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against -the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, -that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry -Adams his novel, "Democracy." - -With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these -men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, -motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding -type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong -assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon -which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of -literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist -and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who -are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and -disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American -minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of -William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad -crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate -minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of -glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing -materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see -from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, -these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by -theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers -who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age -that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop -to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form. - -Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: -no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; -there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, -for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing -eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping -with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes -that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything -essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, -admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he -mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a -belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism -of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural -possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely -upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does -not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of -life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his -eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism -of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic -dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play -in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of -decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, -of inarticulate misery--read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of -the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other -nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or -next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would -have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch -without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing -upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna -of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, -moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain -hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had -forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the -welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's -"manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of -pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the -disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a -certain beautiful residuum of truth. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -IN THE CRUCIBLE - - - "The American proposes to realize his individuality freely - and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and - free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly - consenting that some other person, better qualified or more - competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when - he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to - will." - - GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: _The People of Action_. - - -Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the -gold-fields of Nevada--the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one -that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded -Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the -woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about -a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good -time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a -child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him -out for destruction. - -Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confrères of -the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of -history, travels, literature and the sciences--a young man whom it was -an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says -Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, -indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as -one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a -certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from -the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of -barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and -dandy--in fancy percales and patent leathers--in white duck and striped -shirts--he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch -hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of -the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in -dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further -than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable -surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And -whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his -utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life -as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing -vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't -suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier -frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching -thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half -the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the -indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of -development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him -had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had -been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. -He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment. - -Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true -of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of -previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common -fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the -gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it -was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were -transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion -of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing -It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of -the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there -as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the -'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever -produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves -were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other -vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost -fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes -that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in -every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military -companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, -'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, -civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey -mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and -station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. -The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock -lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North -to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development." - -This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly -opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark -Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he -might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing -spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark -Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, -far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make -terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such -a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make -money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family--that old pledge was -fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his -failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own. -Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was -the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally -enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great -triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered -it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were -gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to -exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing -what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, -more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the -river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his -father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had -become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother -Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of -success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the -position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say, -compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not -fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for -him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine -once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make -good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also -become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his -Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look -upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or -revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man. - -What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself? -A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of -inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the -indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had -obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was -indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was -tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held -absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the -rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who -submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher -standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the -easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." -Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative -instinct, therefore--and he was anything but fully aware of them--he -could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his -craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to -acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of -sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--all -those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct--were, from -the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely -in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken -down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the -tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in -them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his -own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly -organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of -torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe, -which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering -words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks -of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was -always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous -hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it -our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He -was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality -was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a -day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were -incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who -was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated -at first, he always yielded in the end. - -Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive -instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was -stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one -could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one -afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying -'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would -come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he -would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going -after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all -their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around -to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next -forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual -facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself -strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as -twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a -foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest -a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand -in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you -that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had -to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not -merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his -level best to become a millionaire. - -It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain -failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth -a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with -exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he -failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new -work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. -Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment--these were the -qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life -had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of -his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in -spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not -fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He -went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied -me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. -"The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, -"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their -movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and -suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom -humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are -likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the -flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense -anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other -extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up -everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his -comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to -the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to -bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a -critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed -simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to -succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and -yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly -anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark -Twain's business life. - -So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious -desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of -individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in -the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted -him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the -necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American -writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain -solved by becoming a humorist. - -Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's -soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more -than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of -his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he -would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off -"alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely -from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at -all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his -surroundings"--wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would -hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything -else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to -establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the -fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." -"He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner -who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a -camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!--all the -contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's -fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to -succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in -himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives -in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted -to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any -one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up -hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary -paper in Virginia City; hell!" - -Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary -pretensions called the _Enterprise_, which was edited and written by a -group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was -to the _Enterprise_ that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and -at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he -presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with -profound reluctance. - -Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born -writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any -opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a -life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have -gravitated toward such people as the _Enterprise_ group: that he did so -is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But -committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a -different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky -journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the -pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a -good time," says Mr. Paine. "The _Enterprise_, 'Comstock to the -backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain -could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself -with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, -as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" -says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as -a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he -fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when -"the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all -hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding -himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile -walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," -says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he -came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How -different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his -piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked -forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an -inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself -and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a -capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a -hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the _Enterprise_ office worn and -travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard -leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about -one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he -added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It -was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to -claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is -something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that -suggests not an acclamation but a surrender? - -Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the -_Enterprise_ Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He -attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to -me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to -break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the -surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." -No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more -or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on -the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was -relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune -that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were -plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him -reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself -so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to -excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, -and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this -opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must -consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but -the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the -creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but -actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the -_Enterprise_ mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he -had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, -and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of -a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by -the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was -this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens -the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark -Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the _Enterprise_ -was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate -that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, -the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if -he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would -prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any -other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For -him, therefore, the opportunity of the _Enterprise_ meant an obligation -to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he -wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would -not have displayed such reluctance in joining the _Enterprise_, and the -fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a -humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling -his own soul. - -Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come -to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. -But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his -amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading -together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his -triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and -said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself--I am allowing -myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any -longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied -himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to -choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not -only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many -instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a rôle which he -apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate -all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it. - -But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. -Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer -rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the -mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new -title"--the pen-name he had adopted--"and its success." He knew that his -severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, -worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he -was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a -rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that -promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the -mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately -proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his -new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we -actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to -telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That -he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that -he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a -commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: -"His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," -says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not -with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was -necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a -good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the -_nom de plume_ was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, -crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations -in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted -a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his -merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the -time--in pioneer circles, especially, observe--simply argues that all -the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a -form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own -persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting -coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe -water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in -Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought -of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which -he was proud only because it paid. - -It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he -had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone -astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was -intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was -desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the -evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been -here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We -are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find -with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again." -Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is -certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is -crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his -journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No--not -home again--in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The -city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business -anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had -become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had -been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a -loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the -trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New -York as he is about to start on the _Quaker City_ excursion which is to -result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two -letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of -his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he -says: "I am wild with impatience to move--move--_move_!... Curse the -endless delays! They always kill me--they make me neglect every duty and -then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never -had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am -so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish -anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored -full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an -accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless -moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly -unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his -family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the -most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself -to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, -transgressed his principle of growth? - -One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in -New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it -was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in -the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. -Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while -for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a -lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought -disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus -Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it -as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he -believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written -January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what -to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up -and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save -piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be -excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single -out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and -His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to -please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed -that he had not even offered it to _The Californian_, the magazine to -which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard -it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter -prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he -has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other -hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for -it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate -him, this poor, ingenuous being!--this divided soul who has never been -able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows -no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his -own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping -Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone -rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary -edifice." - -So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted -this rôle unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic -self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying -that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative -instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive -instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that -instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by -public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine, -"was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that -never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings -of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been -to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even, -constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler -calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order -to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak -child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal -life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his -companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled -in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular. -United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make -money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it -received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected, -repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb -and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest. - -Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights -of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets. -Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes -of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to -laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered -a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the -mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his -improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect." -He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a -bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The -Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some -degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute -accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the _Quaker City_ he -found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry -Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to -follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second -book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and -intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides -this, it brought him the recognition of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It -brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the -postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a -choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be -disposed to accept--"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a -Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's -appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It -brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, -assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London--mine being -(between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was -received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the -long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least -one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on -any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in -gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when -one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite -actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred -against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." -Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which -he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset -his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in -Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go -home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic -conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient -in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had -made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had -pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in -America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored -regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely -overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most. - -It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James -Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in -their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a -humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing -that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be -something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they -found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant -something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of -culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal -visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but -to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only -ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been -a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent -barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the -presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen -applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a -dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do -it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to -his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being -gulled, and partly because he wasn't--because the beautiful force of -his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, -because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, -are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with -slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was -not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was -being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, -by the people who really _knew_, whose judgment could really be trusted. -Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply -countersigning the verdict of America. - -For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain -men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have -seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation -into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment -when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business -agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about -this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But -the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America -played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over -to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward--these -must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a -diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was -not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything -less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all -their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made. - -It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus -Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada -world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are -told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps -with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too -could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's -counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit -with possibilities of inner growth before him--what could Artemus Ward -have known about such things?--but as an embryonic institution, so to -speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself -and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he -ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was -subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," -said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement -of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and -character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with -inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had -been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we -look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les -Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for -knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can -we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not -withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, -had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not -already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America -capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said -to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least -resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your -mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend--into life -and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and -"extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never -forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he -acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and -refined party" of the _Quaker City_ excursion which led him to the feet -of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward -Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread -and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," -said he--Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now -here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to -deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than -enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do -it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him -how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his -percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in -the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were -the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men -of statecraft, literature and divinity. - -Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance -of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner -peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him -committed to the pursuit of worldly success. - -That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a -creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. -He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral -infantility. We know that the rôle of laugh-maker had, from early -adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in -Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers -laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud -and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, -where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his -audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, -he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in -public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had -returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held -so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That -persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to -a _métier_ in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of -craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It -was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least -resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was -falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied -that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the -artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a -journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance. - -Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he -wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have -doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, -except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." -To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success -of his book--a success the like of which had scarcely been known in -America--Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a -journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and -editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the -rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer -with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that -Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's -fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest -point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had -temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now -again literature had dropped into the background, had become an -avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial -interests!--there were whole years during which he thought of hardly -anything else. - -This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, -with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic -attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to -"follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a -series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage -of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the -same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of -adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was -this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered -by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the -success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other -autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige -machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning -to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary -life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the -boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a -peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other -phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various rôles he has -played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or -education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I -ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that -under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the -reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really -experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all -different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the -artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an -infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he -tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and -again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There -was nothing new in that story"--"The American Claimant"--"but the -finger-prints in this one is virgin ground--absolutely _fresh_, and -mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied -a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded -to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public -wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with -what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"--the -possibilities of this, the possibilities of that--in the commercial, not -in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the -promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with -its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, -in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series -that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not -as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally -conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his -life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot -and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant -of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naïvely, -"but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a -thing as an artist had never existed. - -Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark -Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his -agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, -Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain -hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is -reputation anyway--money is secondary." So he floods the house with -complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he -says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune -didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and -your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the -country." It was true. But in that moment--that typical moment, in that -reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's -die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with -generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to -walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes -to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a -formidable spirit, that _alter ego_ within him,--he is going to hear its -bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: -his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the -dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned -over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished -to secure a government appointment for Orion." - -Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable -sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says--with an emphasis of his -own--he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. -From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called -adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence -without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" -now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments." - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - - - "Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as - bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride." - - IBSEN: _The Comedy of Love_. - - -The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, -consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead -himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and -still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most -consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own -way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy -calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what -Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, -of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so -little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in -America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: -"in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious -things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to -practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon -one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the -bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. -No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of -industry. - -Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he -put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light -are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if -Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the -children of light he would have been perfectly free--to starve and to -shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its -moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he -could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the -recognized American game according to the recognized American rules. - -Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct -of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just -because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks -of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that -people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling -them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the -lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a -personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his -environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear -for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the -most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without -foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. -Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he -wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, -to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left -vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished -him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he -met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make -good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew -the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in -prestige, stood to him _in loco parentis_; and, to complete the ironic -circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a -Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them -he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. -Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody." - -The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later -years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we -are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser -Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit -heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions -that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the -will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus -Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what -they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret -Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently -until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to -a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in -the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above -all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first -moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary -affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature -and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean -Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The -Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the -woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom -with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual -rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by -his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the -self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go -his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always -been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve -it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S. -McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself. - -In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to -the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the -prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a -contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the -community to which money is the primary condition and the primary -instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew -Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged -to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the -spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an -expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a -young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued -now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And -meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social -inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish -manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness--everything that made -foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that -would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to -consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of -a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of -bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had -ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had -become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of -humor was a gold-mine--so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently -cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He -was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he -wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot -properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we -realize that he had been manœuvered into the rôle of a candidate for -gentility. - -But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had -been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his -creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead -father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his -mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man, -in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take -precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been -the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the -days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he -was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go -back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure -as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained -precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time, -we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever--proud (even if somewhat, -critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had -been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, -scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In -turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the -same Sam, and always would be--a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true -that Mark Twain, _who_ required authority as much as he required -affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who -would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be -mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at -least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and -afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the _Quaker -City_ party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and -character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed -my buttons on," he wrote--he was thirty-two at the time--"kept my -clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), -lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only -natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife -"implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his -subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, -"she edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my -works--she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the -totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia -Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death -Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her. -Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about -him?--"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was, -I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken -the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place. -Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara -Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the -billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."--a sign that was -always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been -called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used -to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him -straight--"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he -went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have -been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue -of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male. - -As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest -that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been -affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other -reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to -adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest -instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of -success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with -the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on -terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old -renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make -good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated -obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just -as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or -finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little -less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying -that, automatically, her gods had become his. - -It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations -between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere -of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even -of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is -regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English -criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, -Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family -and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village -ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At -bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic -analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is -of profound importance to society and because they know that what any -man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and -affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind -that all the best biographies even of our American worthies--Hamilton, -Franklin and Lincoln, for instance--have been written by Englishmen! No -one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society -has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, -therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited -his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, -whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his rôle as a realist and -carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her -heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest -has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and -that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations -and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist -and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of -European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New -Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as -creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. -Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, -she stepped immediately into a rôle far more truly influential than that -of any President. - -Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and -mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in -any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization -all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual -culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted -down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had -attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social -stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, -fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter -generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular -sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, -imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to -submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august -brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains -on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with -their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The -quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect -based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of -the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice -proclaimed them sacrosanct. - -We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a -presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place--a place -of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, -pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the -daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not -to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame -did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted -almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that -Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of -Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he -had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had -been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect -for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt -himself, the interloper then--he would not have been Carlyle but the -stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark -Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl -without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned -anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been -conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her -friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore--and love -compelled him to do that--he had to win the approval and the pride of -Elmira itself, he had to win the _imprimatur_ of all that vast and -intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the -symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," -that "no one was good enough for her--certainly not this adventurous -soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark -Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy -upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in -order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in -California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his -character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the -"worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover -on his mettle? - -Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this -new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able -to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his -candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the -vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and -lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know, -"he had become suddenly a person of substance--an associate of men of -consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He -was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to -that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to -refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But -could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we -are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his -financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book," -he wrote, "unless there was _money_ in it, and a good deal of it"; he -had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and -"conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were -almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent -and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his -marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already--the best possible -omen for one with his resources--$22,000 in debt! He had put his -shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even -faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so -manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being -equal--and his wife would see to that--he really was a safe, -conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon -capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain, -anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to -cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been -accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course -they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and -besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start -them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in -"The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal -that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, -whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all -significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author -adds, naïvely, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated -as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon -in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally -stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that -this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his -gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot -forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable -street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage -and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous _ménage_. -It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's -wedding day!--he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the -confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely -committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the -outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly -shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had -foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, -"lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper -enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the -ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the -ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged -it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound -himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that -Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo _Express._ -Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business -man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one. - -The full consequences of this moral surrender--shall we call it?--can -only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, -precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently -and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he -might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in -his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many -other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven -back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect _horror_ and -heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the -bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I -cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I -suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you -would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have -wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems -to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who -was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His -bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. -"Farewell--a long farewell--to business!" he exclaimed during those -weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will _never_ touch -it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I -will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as -follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good -and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer -up--don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has -been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. _Except_ when I think of -you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving -and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem -to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the -dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but -no dishonor--and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, -Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she -doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't -convince _me_!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary -of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before -all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, -who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her -husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind -in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. -She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and -all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in -the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to -retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very -ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he -was involved more and more deeply in it. - -As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation -as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should -adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that -he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the -matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had -promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was -laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed -his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical -type--at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete -invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to -sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her -back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, -to arise and walk--Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, -and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. -"I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark -Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first -child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal -absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his -wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I -am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am -done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith -to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What -chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the -pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find -his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never -possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new -life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are -valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are -admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that -private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime -interests of man. - -"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is -said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and -the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all -matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. -"Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of -supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for -the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a -little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely -going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had -been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; -but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and -purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his -personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she -set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in -each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward -the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, -indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; -she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of -religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his -religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens -had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... -It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family -prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a -Bible chapter." Thus was reëstablished over him that old Calvinistic -spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a -child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what -fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious -man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, -for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," -says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly -with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with -the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the -proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had -long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she -prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness -to which he, the chivalrous Southerner--the born cavalier, in -reality--could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him -"Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in -keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could -never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only -accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he -gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her -"exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own -judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as -another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would -quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral." - -It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the -blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in -turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive -about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me -do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was -partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, -but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between -the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial -body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in -their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was -also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried -to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having -annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in -order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose -approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of -embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table -that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, -"and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was -almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the -guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells -after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells -bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than -we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last -moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send -her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more -for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for -mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, -after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had -privately suggested to you that we hadn't any _frames,_ and that if you -wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was -simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How _could_ -you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive -nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have -been intolerable to her that, at the _Atlantic_ dinners, her husband, in -spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood -was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as -Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, -unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all -hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his -Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace -does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my -list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I -was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my -repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as -an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not -been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it -tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, -as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods. - -Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character -can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his -marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter -of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of -letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept -him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial -assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo _Express_; in return, -he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his -Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be -immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate -editorship of the Buffalo _Express_ without a single word of comfort or -encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to -be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word -shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom -is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more -innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage -had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of -chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already -induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting -"parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal, -the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could -manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief -censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed -him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture, -meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please -Boston--impossible, terrifying task!--had become as obligatory upon Mark -Twain as to please Elmira. - -We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the -Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider -the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared -to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of -his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston -audience--4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and -he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in -a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a -charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells -was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the -nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the -latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her -husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled -them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter -of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a -court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him--to his -own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to -your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who -takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and -of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject -when Livy took charge of me ... and I may _still_ be to the rest of the -world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no -doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been -enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as -an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own -self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in -behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no -comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were -themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges -of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's -neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It -seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an -old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great -embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder -that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do -about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats -and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In -this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility--provincial because it -was without a sense of proportion--were kept constantly before his mind -and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the -Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad -threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple -Delilah his wife. - -For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a -taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The -criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens -and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they -formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to -read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of -life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could -not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion -of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud, -under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible -and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive -ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, -was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold -novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language -for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at -work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so -greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather -discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all. -"Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs. -Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable -damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other -way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind -fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And -shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by -the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy -says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're -going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly -gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits -and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody -might have written but whose romantic mediævalism was equally -respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs. -Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have -been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." -Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural -genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such -subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if -we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in -these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of -"blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark -Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only -tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly -pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds: -"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He -persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet -acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to -friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so -little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this -mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, -precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to -live down. - -Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the rôle of critic and censor. A -memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over -the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her -task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them: - - Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word - would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty - often. - - But can't I get it in _any_where? You've knocked it out - every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, - good word. - - Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing - a slave boy. - - It's out, and my father is whitewashed. - - Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change - "breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. - I would take that and "offal" out of the language. - - You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. - - - -We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive -as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility -and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, -no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no -artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for -bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his -latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as -something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of -conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, -specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; -and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to -further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially -as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, -as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash -not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. -Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't -afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his -letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the -"swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the -thing Huck would say"--namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark -Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a -certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of -Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it -into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his -conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the -German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. -Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. -Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute -she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her -tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to -miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. -Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my -scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little -one-sided?" - -They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers -behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for -an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. -"Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party--in -Rome--he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one -wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. -Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, -you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, -regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've -been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these -tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an -ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. -Very humiliating, and also very tragic! - -Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western -life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to -win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, -seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant -word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of -liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess -that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" -was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that -grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to -formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, -free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, -he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins -themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And -in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all -the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, -instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the -genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature -and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to -seek. - -Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain -Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty -years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough -in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it -assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he -wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his -little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up -and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one -more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do -anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, -and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one -locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in -1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular -success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he -had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from -pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire--we know it as -much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his -own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious -to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of -corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was -here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid -before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: -'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere -magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself--publish it -first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some -of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There -was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of -the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark -Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe -in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! -The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was -to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great -leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child -who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to -smoke the pipe of truth. - -Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it -shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe -and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man--is it -remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, -happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, -the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game -as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns -an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life -is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, -as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five -on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week -day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss -wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, -on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a -will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from -responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of -creating standards of his own and living up to them? - -"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," -wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which -influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets -him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find -himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose -approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's -command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a -deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views -which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and -blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in -public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like -the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his -environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color--had -he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul? - -"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his -life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had -never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor -express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more -idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any -possibility have occurred to him to _resolve_ to become brave. He _could -not originate the idea_--it had to come to him from the _outside_." - -The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of -Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic -plea in self-extenuation? - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - - - "Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole - capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he - cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping - friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what - one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. - This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ." - - IBSEN: _Letter to Brandes_,1870. - - -And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that -all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, -uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and -passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who -used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. -Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher -of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark -Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and -unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he -has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every -great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous -relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined -to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian -interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the -labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his -individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to -type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer -environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering -in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, -from the outset of his life, subjected itself! - -Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy -as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," -he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition -was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and -uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas -and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an -expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; -trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark -Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a -person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven -to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they -did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, -to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the -husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the -purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and -entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of -his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this -narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so -powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that -instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood. - -We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's -universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he -seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his -fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his -nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. -"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a -heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes -and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and -lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came -home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its -eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from -this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed -neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the -worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one -great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's -home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his -domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any -monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; -it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And -having accepted the rôle of the opulent householder, he threw into it as -much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work. - -Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going -to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses -were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up -to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," -"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, -according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to -increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at -hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for -explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those -who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand -that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, -mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something -almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent -considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of -living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for -some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, -not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel -Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the -visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently -extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was -living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses -amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In -the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could -furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and -highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural -taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, -would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those -early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his -"disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that -finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large -hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, -"he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and -delight of his guests. There were _always_ guests; they were coming and -going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a -'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of -his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay -the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he -virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer -months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his -mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these -things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that -they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed -for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit -cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more -ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the -child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she -found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy! - -To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the -public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the -beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large -consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of -adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up -in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of -the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have -remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and -become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing -need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a -professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a -waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt -requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of -casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a -postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use--not to mention -the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were -his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. -He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of -other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding -he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first -author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work--his -impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in -this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"--that he -had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had -been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can -add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and -one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see -one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact -that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to -which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to -the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the -following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of -marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a -spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises -amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is -not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two -hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained -of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had -to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no -choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he -had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of -his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one -month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to -redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for -a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries -of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred -million dollars. - -Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced -in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to -heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? -Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the -distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy -with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to -follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book -because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"--for this he -had, in fact, become--he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might -say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular -enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the -same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the -proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns -to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he -who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten -days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative -principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at -least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, -gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make -millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of -authors--he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the -country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, -"reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone -of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions -a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing -themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them -three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if -his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift -and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he -is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, -impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against -the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it -with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he -has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, -"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means -of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He -"liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was -pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger -to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of -his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of -the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him--"here I -am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt -gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that? - -For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had -adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, -position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation -of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe. - -He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more -oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the -trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What -were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of -Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General -Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the -"Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. -It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it -was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for -getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were -secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost -consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish -weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own -shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what -he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly -confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for -a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, -penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain, -untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, -immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most -interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is -quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of -Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing -figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration -of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because -of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his -faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he -admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, -is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race -prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of -imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American -business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever -held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was -Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut -Yankee," had set out to make mediæval England a "going concern" could -hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that -phenomenon in all history. - -Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view -of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European -letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the -appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are -told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his -family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a -distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of -the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be -ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated -by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a -feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity -student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he -told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the -deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to -us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew -him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and -circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find -him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely -imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was -carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters -to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged -in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything -on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the -cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it -was in his power and his fame. - -Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in -the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set -against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, -Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the -headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and -infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has -seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with -complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept -as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding -materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing -so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In -1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a -Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of -improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested -that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he -was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the -great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the -framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far -Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the -colors of the privileged class which the new industrial régime had -brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a -member. - -His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his -essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in -the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to -his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence -and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends -the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for -the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets -the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy -which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more -nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the -tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, -against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I -finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every -time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay -the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not -a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy -of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish -to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, -"Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a -scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a -Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous -defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, -tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he -was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one -situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for -trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he -would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, -frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which -he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent -to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages -in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on -the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on -the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London -drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the -Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the -insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of -sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral -splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men -benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly -opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this -was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time -he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have -afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his -letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry -views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily -written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to -dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud -voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of -his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing -attendance on him!--how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not -hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly -have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the -principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic -victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one -situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate -the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; -and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his -dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an -article passionately advocating that the salaries of American -ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be -devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true -function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing -it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial -society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement. - -As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take -precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with -him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the -pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the -feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on -England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the -scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend -those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson -having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English -Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to -the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, -how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic -bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was -regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. -As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to -include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less -and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself -against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious -tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with -very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive -economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in -his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply -he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, -then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in -his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more -than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had -once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy -Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to -say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I -never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore -when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to -the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant -self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel -of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the -Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for -in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is -lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a -Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book -or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find -him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other -Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into -his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint -Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut -Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch -whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to -accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was -Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself -over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he -who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in -a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy -Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there -recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his -Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of -Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated. - -So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed -reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty -liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the -American nation in the hollow of his hand--the nation, or rather the -epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or -trump--but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home -with his public--he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to -pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he -does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored -family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from -every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark -Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause -would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that -matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole -neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a -unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, -had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor. - -Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character -he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an -uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an -expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his -surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naïve worship -of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical -inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of -subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this -let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I -have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, -spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at -all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And -once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular rôle and had -forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the -pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards -of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he -had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a -reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years -and an ass for fifty-five." - -It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's -instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of -literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was -merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any -other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination -for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other -business man--to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make -money because other people made money and to make more money than other -people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother -Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the -span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I -have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford -it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." -Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was -sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to -realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and -in the other that he had not lived it--for certainly his marriage had -not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public! -Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so -supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no -conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, -he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business -enterprise and of letters. - -"If Sam had got that pocket"--we remember the saying of his old -California comrade--"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of -his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent -of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he -have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes -happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and -perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its _débâcle_, Mark -Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to -stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, -"have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had -been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own -books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were -promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to -write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work -altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so -neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes -of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as -well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of -the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing -business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We -have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have -been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": -of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my -retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain -pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we -can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this -ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical -aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning -Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is -simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade -and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, -found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the -material rewards it brought him. - -How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point -of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those -middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised -men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to -the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the -hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. -Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the -literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's -cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how -Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a -personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the -word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as -against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic -of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the -Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain -disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the -Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to -mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her -husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as -nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the -illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was -identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his -brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting -Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion--At 12:20 this afternoon a -line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the -first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was -done _automatically_--instantly--perfectly. This is indeed the first -line of movable types that ever _was_ perfectly spaced and perfectly -justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the -immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. -Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well--dizzy, -stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human -brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful -mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how -wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered -the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was -fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, -too far away--as even his financial interest was too shallow, after -all--to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable -mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, -of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark -Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a -piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of -the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of -the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations -in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he -called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations -are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets -who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's -seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such -people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had -witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and -innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age -for having produced Walt Whitman. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - - - "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test - of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" - - JOHN STUART MILL. - - -We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in -Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America -indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we -recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to -the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every -influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of -opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the -real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling -Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which -had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real -Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained -rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a -child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this -childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual -independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work -as a writer. - -"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous -temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one -written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland -where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three -at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing -that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him -to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. -To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as -we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the -torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got -back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he -could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and -when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he -would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been -so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what -he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I -was the kind of person that _does_ things. Does them and reflects -afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without -asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that -time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been -punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and -reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I -still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and -reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition -of immaturity. - -Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for -gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the -fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed -dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes -of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had -the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were -staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go -down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an -elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at -the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the -dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to -this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he -added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went -back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came -down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a -really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. -To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like -descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place -where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous -at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully -protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk -waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was -seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along -the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the -dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for -his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do -the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. -When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at -Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford -pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was -"planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient -Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would -have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or -rather still, Tom Sawyer? - -Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense -of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of -his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not -Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell -that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a -literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not -affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so -increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our -political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where -that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to -have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and -economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his -traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social -tendencies that had so spectacular a _dénouement_ within four years of -his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the -century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's -funeral--"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, -"will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from -now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the -Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was -involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might -almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is -scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy -of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of -it--indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity -regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same -rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think -of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a -succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives -wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that -the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of -Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the -world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification -whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was -"entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political -history." - -And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark -Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. -Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of -sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, -political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would -expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for -example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It -requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious -little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the -communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade -every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the -sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? -Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most -conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly -unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all. - -And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped æsthetic -sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the -common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of -an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch -below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the -majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous -acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world -remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in -heaven":--"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to -have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in -matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is -mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going -to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did -he like? In painting, Landseer--"and the way he makes animals absolute -flesh and blood--insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little -and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could -tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the -beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and -that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than -any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs -America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, -Kipling--"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are -told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a -sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained -his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that -Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the -fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar -Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of -doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbô," -which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was -wholly non-æsthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could -stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. -He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's -"Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have -taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of -all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight -in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and -Thanatopsianism--in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the -most primitive form of æsthetic emotion, combined with just those tints -of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are -characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence. - -Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the -mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his -lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic -self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose -extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes -gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of -letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, -the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of -greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his -own juvenility freely registered itself. - -"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very -remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, -"but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have -developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... -he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even." - -I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the -fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has -been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; -she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been -the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, -childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm -perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of -that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was -in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in -upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of -happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual -and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, -Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children -themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house -always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider -scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish -hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by -trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an -energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have -guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells -reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; -admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, -there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story -of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that -story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown -men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy -was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds -the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps -that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it. - -Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there -ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His -mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and -without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off -as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which -would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from -his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable -were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable -to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was -super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was -doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe. - -Unused, half-used, misused--was ever anything like that energy? Mr. -Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because -his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of -darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing -himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, -because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to -the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant -trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of -gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, -unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to -turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the -final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest -as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead -lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, -thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. -Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been -published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't -have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's -letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His -mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance -that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature -tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's -way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the -fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded -manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts -about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the -interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer -Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in -1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly -tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family -censor--"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a -dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn -Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which -Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death--how many others -were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, -loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in -his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions--how -like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of -authority!--was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast -flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk--was it garrulous, was it not -rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an -undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, -following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, -outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind? - -An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty--could there be a -surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all -this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon -who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two -supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his -writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has -monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art. - -Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits -of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is--where -shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can -write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; -"but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I -didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't -play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that -years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a -play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine -articles and books--and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this -a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a -talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of -letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from -attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but -the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and -well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had -interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those -months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He -appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he -found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of -beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true -even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he -was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the -Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd -contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the -publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know -how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." -This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the -composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, -impossible performance"--no doubt because he had been able to write the -whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only -by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He -wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing -and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing -it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but -incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was -probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more -ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession -of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was -he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in -defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was -the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold. - -In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we -observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden -desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot -master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to -interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of -sustained interest in his work--his lack of interest in literature -itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of -his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the -technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, -surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his -æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by -æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems -to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in -literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. -Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had -never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother -had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, -he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of -Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, -in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane -Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper--is not -that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here -again there was a positive note--his lifelong preoccupation with -grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas -by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly -verbal!--"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful -German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's -Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," -"General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation -in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells -that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for -saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some -imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling -women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward -the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be -infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are -all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his -first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I -suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in -the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with -letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of -"Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring -from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing -off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to -take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially -never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well? - -Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man -is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his -taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some -slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" -having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years -after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright -copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, -although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to -understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, -obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human -spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The -Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark -Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the -expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through -the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican--all the galleries.... We -examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, -Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we -didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar -stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We -fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor -and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its -pet feature--there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and -Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a -hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, -more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known -was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the -American people of his time were simply the English middle class -transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to -Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to -have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife -and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had -subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his -mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an -old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream -of the "land of Egypt"--Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at -all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European -tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. -His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of -the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry -and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of -Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with -these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which -had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all -the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage. - -How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine -speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to -construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate -personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief -gifts--transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater -at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are -indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation -in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process -of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of -them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in -design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or -historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," -"Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom -Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he -said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he -assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon -his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose -in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the -Mississippi"--and even there it is the river itself and not its human -nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in -Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of -American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never -become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over -that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed -to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his -characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has -sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only -characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded -Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, -he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and -what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: -unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he -says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined -sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the -book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not -attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail -how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in -passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is -perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been -transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. -He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in -consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even -to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of -his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos -of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: -consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear -of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his -imagination. - -We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit -with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the -artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of -influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas -are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's -imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except -for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his -own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own -spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without -development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins--a -fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": -"Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost -entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private -venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not -to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. -When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded -by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal -experience. - -Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage -that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson -Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he -had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had -come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It -was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should -write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he -set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and -stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": -we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down -the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, -because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in -nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never -used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems -hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to -write for the _Atlantic_ and it is only then that fresh memories rise in -his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand -for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to -Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A -Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful -for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even -"Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not -spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the -story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in -him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in -another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells -to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written -for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and -slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to _The Atlantic_," says Mr. -Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and -before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to -work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of -it are condemned here and there and yonder." - -Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious -"laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary -sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at -the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on -authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that -to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but -what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose -luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, -especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in -bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy -comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that -indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to -spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no -doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his -matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether -useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too -seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent -assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, -and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign -that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of -those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with -all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a -boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a -journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the -goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low -that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged -him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the -capitalist régime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of -reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system -in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare -himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was -predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 -of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very -last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide -repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: -'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one -imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But -who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from -a lazy line? - -It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can -explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was -subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take -notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make -speeches." That innocent _réclame_ of his, that irresistible passion for -the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to -have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his -inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart -had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For -court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living -that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done -worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four -months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on -the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one -of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was -dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into -which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed -into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been -able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that -rôle the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" -he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to -be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." -And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that -he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing -quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the -truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent -youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them -into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of -being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of -his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who -certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a -passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the -last man gave out from sheer exhaustion." - -For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his -work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an -increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly -have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We -remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the _Quaker -City_ excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically -meaningless to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless that it -seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in -my mind as a pleasant memory.... An accusing conscience gives me peace -only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it -but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by -the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to -penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the -change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the -Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from -"art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and -duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the -first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier, -"before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river -itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his -task explaining, in that connection, the difference between -"theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just -so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more -so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the -'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has -become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that -descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an -absolutely certain financial success--how repellant it became to him as -time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the -self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell -that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't -have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, -and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and -propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down -went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he -had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief? -"The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to -finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A -Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it. -He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted -child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a -charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the -moment in the approval of his wife. - -We have seen--and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his -arrested development--that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for -literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What -is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in -his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think--over-expressed -it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so--in something he wrote once -of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as -we say, more than for aught else whatever--cared for them with that kind -of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond -votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a -refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect -freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark -Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My -right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write -this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it--no, I mean 1,000,000--next -fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't -have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have -been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost -cynical indifference, of insolence even. - -Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a -significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the -creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, -"his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on -his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far -behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and -it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his -best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his -judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and -certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can -take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything -but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with -such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object -in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had -approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the -craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how -exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!--"possibly the book may -not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." But more -striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven -times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of -preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation -and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously -exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in -that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully. -What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for -"Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he -had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own -fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular -pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them -anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from -the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious -ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of -indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey -of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve -years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his -delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine, -the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying--that spirit which -came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly -gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which -tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the -dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a _réchauffé_ for children, -for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no -doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely -treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the -book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never -known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains -in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship. - -If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine -the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same -time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive -stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession, -have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think -of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was, -says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw.... -On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably -would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence -due?--"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all -but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with -all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent, -prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in -one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get -a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his -"laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform, -and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought -always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice -of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have -said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in -fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his -essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the -_raconteur_ of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is -just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of -mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of -the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a -boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land -because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him -reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had -remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To -tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper -places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at -last--oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control, -to spring that final effect of horror!--there was something worthy of a -man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in -his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable -through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and -training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age -of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, -to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had -Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential -authority, with that old negro _raconteur_, that old pilot of the -Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark -Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his -best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, -the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as -often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had -expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at -least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at -least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: -in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring -masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and -thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass -muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the -others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, -inherited folk-skill--he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist -ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his -_métier_, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever -more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going -his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. -Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual -consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had -remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural -genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with -which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he -found open before him. - -It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life -should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it -now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and -why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The -autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on -hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because -they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore, -that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it -is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either -internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until -it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open -and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary -number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the -surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which -is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the -American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial -success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse, -characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find -him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an -absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885, -at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained -his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you -can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had -"assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he -had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was -the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually -recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote _con -amore_ were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not -only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something -in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he -was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men--that was the -public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business -men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the -phrase, "children of a larger growth"? - -Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he -seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" -could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly -"Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. -But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom -Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he -associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a -publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" -and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic -consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its -real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, -all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious -Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, -though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. -Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is -clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys -through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its -bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de -Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with -love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this -happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says -that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best -book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown -in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to -a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it -on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One -might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a -hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays -which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of -the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift -stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering -itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books -alone--these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering -on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the -ground. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - - - "Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters." - - ALEXANDER HARVEY. - - - -At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going -through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of -men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a -certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you -would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, -however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is -only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the -guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack -and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact -this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the -imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the -trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another -self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you -perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has -become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in -the twinkling of an eye. - -So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no _real_ morals," he wrote in one -of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and -preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." -Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality -of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but -upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial -morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, -as we have seen, had conformed to a moral régime in which the -profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been -submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the -respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to -depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the -explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self -had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had -concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct -of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that -instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and -manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never -having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to -air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were -black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning -Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant -blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on -it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the -conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it. - -First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he -was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social -régime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious -self urged him to maintain these values and this régime. His unconscious -self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him -in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his -story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the -famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, -he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse -races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with -his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi -diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his -best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two -incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the -symbol of Mark Twain himself. - -Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged -on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was -always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the -floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by -apprehensions--badgered, harassed"--and let us add Mr. Paine's -adjectives--"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset," -till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent -the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he -always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his -will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant, -fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental -desire pointed him just the other way? - -Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had -submerged himself in the rôle of the husband, the father, the neighbor, -the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His -absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development -of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain -was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house -was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own -drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent -caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the -householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one -observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting -against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being -"bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and -tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and -wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." -Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or -getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results -too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain -became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only -just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, -he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so -extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which -developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one -of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and -the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with -her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have -been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not -qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone -who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose -myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which -the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other -caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old -Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic -protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. -Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's -constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found -in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely -inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. -We can see from this that although his conscious life had been -overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, -his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature. - -And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of -Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that -"heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations -like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists -mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate, -that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of -Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness -and priggishness of his own _entourage_? I should go even further, I -should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark -Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had -regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially; -Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for -gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written -to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted -classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of -the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be -as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the -encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; -but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of -fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language. -But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's -literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he -"detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written -by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored -them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have -despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste -was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a -par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his -wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had -accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his -unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to -please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything -about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's -criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude -of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious -self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how -strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself -directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its -teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated -bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic -aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the -repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend -Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, -and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a -companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he -roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried -self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a -prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model. - -We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious -observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when -the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked -on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies -behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were -together on a lecture tour?--"You will never, never know, never divine, -guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made -until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has -taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and -troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke -of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." -His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for -Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," -he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them--they have found a -hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in -fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. -White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar -books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors--after -Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot--were Pepys, Suetonius and -Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, -and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the -cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such -passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely -"spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is -Man?"--"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. -For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I -ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other -difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when -at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: -"Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as -unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, -kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (_and -could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not -I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no -other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which -his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for -Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually -praising their "unrestrained frankness." - -And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of -parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark -Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he -wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. -Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over -Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he -would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold -fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism -was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been -permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to -ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. -Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the -time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the -English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and -assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could -not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the -riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he -poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of -a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at -a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity -among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, -has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard -one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that -are current in every New York publishing house? - -In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful -ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through -the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the -unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait -for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the -_outré_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia -Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark -Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon -upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and -they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and -thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it -from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily -search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and -oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in -order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they -were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort -of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the -texture of Mark Twain's writings. - -For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through -with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In -the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. -In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been -prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or -by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship -which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some -contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, -are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In -such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully -satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a -compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two -railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms -of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud -has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any -reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we -are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious -bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those -embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that -express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies -wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon -which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or -rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this -process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, -certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am -writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some -manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On -these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be -straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." -When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead -Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was -frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote -his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about -himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia -of his soul. - -Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, -for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the -first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is -proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the -book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American -Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he -wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. -Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly -expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to -be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that -never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion -mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself -once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in -short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed -were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that -sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such -times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all -sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits -of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible -animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort -on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a -propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved -abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to -literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in -the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally -been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian -monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant -farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce -to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing -circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but -two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed -the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. -That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed -further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it -stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of -passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry -satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, -that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far -relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the -battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our -very eyes. - -Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of -"wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is -surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the -celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward -J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the -Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they -made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the -celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this -Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him. - -Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate -of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is -the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by -the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note -the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the -unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is -a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu -of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. - -This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead -Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with -Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an -author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that -Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he -continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply -another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the -same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been -privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar, -with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; -appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and -fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful -of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But -irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for -it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided -without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson -was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt -for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him -before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a -genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed -here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets -generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his -scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't -it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired -Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it -possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was -picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? -Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures -Pudd'nhead out-manœuvring the village folk and triumphing over them -in the end. - -Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame -and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more -or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says -Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally -and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were -never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. -For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of -self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and -that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one -but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole -community--of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by -leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield -and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted -incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens," -the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all -those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his -true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and -admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it--it was -these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon -him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who -took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their -hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a -deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in -the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the -misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, -the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to -recognize its divinity? - -Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the -"wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the -desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself -in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the -suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells -about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body -"a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, -far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no -chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale -of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of -a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old -castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into -subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation -for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that. -As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American -Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age," -who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after -one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his -own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful -claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those -fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure -projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business -life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet -forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true -rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark -Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to -account for his constant preoccupation with this idea. - -Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his -old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that -flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and -fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have -been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in -himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese -Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the -usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle -perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and -"The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that constitutes "The Prince -and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the rôle of the -beggar-boy--Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn -himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the -Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically -slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of -incompatibles bound together in one flesh--the Extraordinary Twins, the -"good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad" -boy of whom society disapproves--how many of Mark Twain's stories and -anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!--does he -not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history -of his life? - -We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was -expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become -owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the -poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American -progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," -the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the -discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more -wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been -discussing, however, we can see that while the censorship had been -sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his -unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to -cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his -saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like -Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant," -thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where -"prosperity and position constitute rank." Here, as in the malevolent, -Mephistophelian "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we -perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save -his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained -fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his -finger-print invention--otherwise he would find something better to do -than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how -could you expect a young English snob to know anything about democracy? -That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his -readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would -know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the -great American game of bluff they would have to forgive _him_! As long -as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short, -he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the -public in the hollow of his hand, knew it. - -It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand -the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn." -Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little -boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let -himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the -writing and the fate of this book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to -have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the -publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain! -Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pass the -censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an -irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this -world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization. -That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity -we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting -to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons -attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to -find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he -can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive! -Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness -are so many shields behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of -the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his -unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical -passages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the -mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by -the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has -the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: -"There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The -withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the -sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in -his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism -in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have -appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the -lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial -detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation. -"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," -says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable -on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!--that raft and that -river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole -unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds -and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of -the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"? -Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was -not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright, -shining arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is -because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that -gave it its momentum. - -Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was -intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the rôle of a demiurge, in -fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and -misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for -this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed! -Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs, -petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the -domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those -second parents who had taken the place of his first--we have to thank -it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and -general revolt of Huckleberry Finn: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; - she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - - "Well, everybody does that way, Huck." - - "Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I - can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub - comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that - way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in - a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. - Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got - to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to - git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder - wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she - wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before - folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now - these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I - ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...." - -This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see -what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - - - "To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is - nobler and less trouble." - - _Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._ - - -And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant -Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he -was in revolt against a rôle which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust -upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc" -anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark -Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous -writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other -than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, -we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic -development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this -career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that -found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his -decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious -and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige -had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark -Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and -what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and -at the same time achieved such ample material rewards. - -It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we -have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; -and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency -who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a -humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he -was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of -Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. -Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, -sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of -chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous -cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society -required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems -to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a -distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition--the -battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it -seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, -when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is -the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind -it." - -Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark -Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that -in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found -that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his -diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do _hate_ to go -back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from -mining. "We fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada -as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman -say, the other day, that it was the 'd----dest country under the -sun'--and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never -rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green -thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the -purest--most unadulterated and uncompromising--_sand_." And as with the -setting--so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, -"the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on -him": more than once he found it necessary--this young man of -twenty-eight--"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat -Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs -and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." -That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own -testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d----n San Francisco style -of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made -his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands--"God, what a contrast with -California and the Washoe"!--ever sweet and blessed in his memory. -Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was -this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also -call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which -also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of -his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he -was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was -always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill -his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr. -Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic -waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of -the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam -swear."--Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was -living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation. - -Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of -pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life. -It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with -domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that -sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as -we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was, -nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or -satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were -civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom -civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable -avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which -their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, -they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were -blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, -that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children -were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how -hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining -population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex -tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single -monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which -kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse -in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually -impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept -a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to -conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask -of a rough good-fellowship that found expression mainly in the nervously -and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the -gambling-hell. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which -peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, -quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the very pick and choice of -the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing -It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or -decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed -hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon -the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof -of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed. - -Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that -life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the -fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The -gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an -outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of -masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the -intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the -human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering -one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps -the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was -almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the -day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so -common--that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the -newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his -old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated -duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of -chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser -degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the -pioneers? - -But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that -individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and -preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering -itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but, -victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not -withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from -openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already -pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers -in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were -always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in -calling a relief from restraint. - -We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were -subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the -most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most -complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances -where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most -general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was -the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a -life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the -necessity of making money, of succeeding--the same impulse had brought -him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain -was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from -attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised -and because to have done so would have required just those expressions -of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other -hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of -all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those -outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his -companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never -"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged -physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. -"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty -years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have -lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still -retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that -would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out -into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in -the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his -instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had -to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a -life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he -became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of -individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship of public -opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada. - -Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some -kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, -since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, -had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the -artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, -far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark -Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in -order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he -acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his -individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, -his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different" -or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how -urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society -where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself -by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his -profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing -at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see -from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of -his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was -always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his -humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men -laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short, -of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief -in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those -acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of -consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious -jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will -hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he -could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those -conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this -vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time -keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming -his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a -relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose -investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, -the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of -expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic -effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke -or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely -safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist -in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of -those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of -one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than -the editors had spoken each of the other")--his comrades were able, -without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own -exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred -and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship -that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain -himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to -maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the -position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader. - -For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular -ferocity. The very titles of his Western I sketches reveal their general -character: "The Dutch Nick Massacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing -Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Cæsar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in -the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his -labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the -doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the -phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to -kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead -Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape -hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It -began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a -special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; -but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was -"unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, -the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, -in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt -officials--we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own -painfully honest brother Orion--were frankly afraid of him. "He was very -far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any -way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even -from trying to be a humorist! - -Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik -Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, -found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all -that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down -upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not -enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man -with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same -way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own -childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of -Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged -by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his -antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of -satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest -of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in -him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his -pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated -and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike -he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is -the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in -corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of -things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not -seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was -an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, -their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change -things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a -counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very -moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive -instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to -express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have -led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an -end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as -human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired -Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief -they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could -not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been -compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He -had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a -campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine -says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As -a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote -criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the -result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco -papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a -correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we -are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long -restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the -"humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in -California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from -expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in -short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to -remain a humorist. - -In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover -the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who -found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter -of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no -value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same -trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." -Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he -had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps -we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor -consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't -know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as -surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists -of a sort who lack the courage to admit it. - -Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I -say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to -carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of _The Galaxy,_ to -which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct -a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" -his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a -humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have -already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the -pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the -rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business -men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. -The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for -ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national -demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by -Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at -last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact. - -I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the -Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of -Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly -homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we -have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile -because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or -restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us -feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile _because_! -In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The -"cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all -his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and -as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far -from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in -these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and -even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark -Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches -in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, -lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small -harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances -of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; -but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, -all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the -same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than -the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's -humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the -same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is -to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" -that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us -from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to -murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from -the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us -to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a -phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the -last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is -the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the -demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he -made upon his environment, had become, _pari passu_, progressively more -stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as -barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why -perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment -favorable for a régime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who -has risen," the typical American, himself a business man? - -Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of -succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but -complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the -stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general -"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been -characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation -was practically organized--by a sort of common consent--on the plan of -a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed -to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and æsthetic -development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised -the success of the business régime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark -Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to -the efficiency of this business régime, because it helped to maintain -the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as -it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the -Western pioneer. - -As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business -man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the -"strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an -aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he -find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way -and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an -aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, -diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the -creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic -coöperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts -for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that -expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." -Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional -freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a -retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: -consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, -confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On -the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, -everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, -reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and -responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual -and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor -does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought--and -especially irreverent toward them!--when they gave him a seat below the -salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and -absurd everything of a spiritual, æsthetic and intellectual nature the -recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the -smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as -we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at -antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an -infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being. -That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a -hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the -spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, -involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader -to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional -stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all -these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure -in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much -as the pioneer. - -Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether -they corroborate this argument. - -In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself -seated directly behind a young girl: - - How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she - would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own - thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer - pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy - dreams,--no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit - still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of - a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young - figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the - gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, - tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy - cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy - rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and - so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did - mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red - lips parted, and out leaped her thought,--and with such a - guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just _know_ - I've got five hundred fleas on me!" - -This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its -tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all -the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them -so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in -hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, -prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting -into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a -pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by -a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself -evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no -longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a -butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in -the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to -his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions. - -Another example, the famous "œsophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph -of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story": - - It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The - lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, - hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge - provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that - have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; - the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow - flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep - of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous - flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty - sky a solitary œsophagus slept upon motionless wing; - everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of - God. - -We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury -of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its -various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most -careless reader will accept the œsophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's -sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation -of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and -thus divert the reader's feeling for it. - -To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life -of the man with an eye single to the main chance--that, one would almost -say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one -of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house -down in order to roast his pig--he destroys, that is to say, an entire -complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single -sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are -manifestations of just that personal, æsthetic or moral distinction -which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish. -Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on -General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous -assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the -human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of -the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success -of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the -final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a -democratic régime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition -of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the -fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a -business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is, -however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious -schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," -says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather -hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him -into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark -Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that -in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for -this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook -his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To -exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our -humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from -any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be -abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" -was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of -beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd -pioneer business man. - -How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The -Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological -moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of -industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become -obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it -was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe! -Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's -own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything -of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were -ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be -ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual -development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that -would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too -costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not -only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate -pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as -Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and -all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind -were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, -yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was -notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial -philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in -civilization, of modern America. "I find your people--your best people, -I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only -talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's -novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there -seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in -their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of -the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of -cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The -Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's "Leaves of -Grass," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one -hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Grass," -having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its -whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that -is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the -individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a -commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true -spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring -every traveling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure of -its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so -far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and -the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far -as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing -satisfaction of Americans with a banker's paradise in which, as long as -it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled. - -So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. I -think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought -him. And are we not already in a position to see why the rôle of -humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, -why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own -development? - -Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of -the artist. It meant the suppression of his æsthetic desires, the -degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How -can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end -becoming the victim of his own habit? - -I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved -the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and -delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love -for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for -charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the -Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish -knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands -on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing -something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business -man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation -of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he -continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more -advanced æsthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one -of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the -irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: -one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually -"taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty -becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of -art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven." -In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions -of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. -Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective -coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by -stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself -a scarred child. - -He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day -come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal -humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was -satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great -purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of -which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was -he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he -lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the -"sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his -proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of -moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual -position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating -stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the -indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the -energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became -but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his -"high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by -saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as -fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of -harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that -world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked -everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an -endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that -equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out -of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can -appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after -all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief -life-saver." - - - - -CHAPTER X - -LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - - - "No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence - of ladies." - - _A Double-Barrelled Detective Story_. - - -"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your -works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political -tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain -himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant -intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle which he was, if one may say -so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. -Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with -Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, -Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, -that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him -thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that -extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance -of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the -wish for the deed? - -What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds -up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the -inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is -Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the -obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up to the measure -on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, -intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the -intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism -of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is -embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely -conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain -cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he -did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government -his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly -speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and -government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil -community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view -of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes -for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the -fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? -Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social -life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of -our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own -humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the -support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities -and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw -bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else -begin." - -It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be -sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his -nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, -despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, -he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand -for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so -involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he -could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his -friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to -him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen -that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great -impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even -feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the -wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead -of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and -even flattered it. - -If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to -be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the -puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author -of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of -sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to -divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his -generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric -clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled -away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. -But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are -beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in -assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills -out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been. - -When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small -change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty -aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos -of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see -that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he -says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity -toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct -without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing -from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his -father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's -a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He -delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms -as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after -to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who -is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as -impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at -night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One -was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't -say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was -interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle -Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and -it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of -interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the -continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages -indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior -cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the -satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can -substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has -abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark -Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his -instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, -political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in -private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave -conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made -progress--the first progress in 'ages and ages'--colossal progress. In -what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which -add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But -the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The -materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that -there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was -before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is -a vast change (due to them) in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and -all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme -ideal--all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations -named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the -world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This -lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, -dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of -Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that -he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the -great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, -that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his -friends were the unconscious agents of the business régime, bent upon -deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have -seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering? - -Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was -perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed -into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what -did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country -some of these days when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the -spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich -writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark -Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary -confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the -financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path -of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a -brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read -'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a -cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked -on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those -days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 -or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, -excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to -eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry -Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by -the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great -centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. -If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have -been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested -for his first important book--"The New Pilgrim's Progress"--was regarded -in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing -Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only -when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed -to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but -loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same -gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: -it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose -"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is -obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to -attack them? - -His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it -is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," -that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the -frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a -sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the -readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he -could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky -note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, -that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of -the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" -lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the -case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not -noticing these little spots on the American sun? - -In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems -frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen -that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief -embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been -the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of -speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are -all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and -generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and -politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there -are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed -out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly -animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact -the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand -old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its -devasting irony about every American institution save family -life--Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education -and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's -final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet -the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth -lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain -number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to -redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so--for the story -was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford--by -making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up -young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the -softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, -for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had -the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? -"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but -had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He -welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint -authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a -return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; -Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the -sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one -might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the -West. - -Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an -accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was -too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this -earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg"--not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever -again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of -industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great -Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as -"a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we -know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had -once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, -"that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too -often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that -having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels -backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he -feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the -seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth -century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century -France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The -Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again -the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a -contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the -"Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark -Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King -Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on -corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he -not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who -are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's -biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, -begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form -that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to -estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, -in his private memoranda--"do right and you will be conspicuous." - -Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's -intention and failure in his predestined rôle, the "Connecticut Yankee" -itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the -most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. -Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in -writing it. - -What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he -says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for -America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their -sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to -me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good -intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level -of manhood in turn." - -No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have -blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of -him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. -Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating -gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always -have been slightly irritating--he was irritating even at home, and how -much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to -dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw -red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon -General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, -an attack upon America _and_ upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark -Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book -as the publisher of General Grant, upon his _amour-propre_ as the -countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like -a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a -typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're -another!"--just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul -Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to -put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis -and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of -the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a -frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could -not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities -like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't -tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all -that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered -both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole -English race, indeed, to come and knock them off. - -Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a -satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in -the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, -unconsciously, into a sort of _bouleversement_ of all his actual -personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds -himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up -the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher -level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but -to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In -short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to -do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee -mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours -ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of -the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were -sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages. - -Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's -genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did -not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle -years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his -letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was -absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can -see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A -Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old -Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and -Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to -Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and -thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear -date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my -word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there -was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I -to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; -there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this -progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of -Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that -he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he -proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to -those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something -rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a -land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being -possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up -to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the -inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average -rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous -wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the -seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about -that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected -from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it -might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of -space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he -calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there -is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace--_the approval of -his neighbors and the public_. And perhaps there is something which he -dreads more than he dreads pain--the _disapproval_ of his neighbors and -the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the -disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their -approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous -letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by -deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only -wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in -even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated -classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always -hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to -instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can -get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to -"pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its -objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles -of simple folk! They are the most successful of all. - -The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark -Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection -and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he -records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here -if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. -Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its -institutions"--its institutions, observe--"its fair rural aspects, he -had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; -against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so -admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons -for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed -him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first -English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many -of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English -readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark -Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class -of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that -Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful -heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? -But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, -as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid -its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their -hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, -merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately -desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have -already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of -this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was -this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely -personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in -reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark -that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was -his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public -figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, -in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his -responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of -humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with -him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was -measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without -hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like -the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people -immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the -situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford -neighbors, who had taken him into _their_ hearts and homes?--that was -the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could -not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned -enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize--he was -boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to -satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize -not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won. - -Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine -tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was -badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was -highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the -"Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business -with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author, -we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the -publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be -popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have -been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the -top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the -exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial -pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make -King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?-- -"Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck -and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest -field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the -English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting -the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the -great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks -neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he -wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain -had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the -spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the -magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, -less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also. - -"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it." -Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that -remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable -only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long -deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom -Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be -read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find -him adding: "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." Tell the truth or trump--but get the -trick! - -Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal -processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, -that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success -and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two -letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who -was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive -feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, -as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings -and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable -way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for -his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody -contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, -Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to _mail_ this letter; he understands -that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no -harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a -volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his -crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he -would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one -writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a -very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot -embers in it here and there." - -Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask -himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he -accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the -priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the -accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and -cannot employ it. - -Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark -Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he -finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to -dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. -To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the -premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the -most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, -that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would -have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been -arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those - illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, - obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the - Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war - into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all - respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I - taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to - modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. - MARK. - - DEAR COLONEL--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a - lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK. - -And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that -he announced he was going to show it to the Czar: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the - illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing - but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war - with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty - centuries history will not get done admiring these men who - attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved - it. MARK TWAIN. - -Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful -fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To -Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' -stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had -told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. -'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up -and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. -'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men -can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' -He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he -was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions -and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! -And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in -this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment -to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible -playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars -up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to -support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation." - -Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain -was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes -to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far -more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was -always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to -America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his -aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him -a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious -wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into -the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir -in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position -carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders -to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal -ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, -was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of -reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who -appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. -"The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more -intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the -affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and -punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure -punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a -cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts -which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all -respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I -think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, -boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect -upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or -Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an -assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of -"brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most -pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer. - -This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the -Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who -attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other -hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what -everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society -Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but -monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who -took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in -actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it -appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, -as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the -nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, -the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could -not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the -spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, -for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the -spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was -personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. -Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to -print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion -behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was -the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents -Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by -disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered -the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own -genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a -whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold -quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding. - -Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old -age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared -to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's -biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled -satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an -impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those -merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance -upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him -to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer -interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his -childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; -he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of -his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he -imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. -He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought -in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, -"needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have -done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we -see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and -Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. -Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he -never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The -religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he -meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't -he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those -theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes -about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from -his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his -environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think -of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make -people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with -infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to -curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes -in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, -in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells -Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs -and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. -2006--which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment -of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," -saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so -far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs -one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the -trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the -publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk. - -Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered -life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had -found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth -and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The -absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous -conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's -pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven -is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote -in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he -dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a -single feature in it that he _actually values_. It consists--utterly -and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on -the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do -not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are -singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about -two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in -a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not -many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have -variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you -have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented -a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is -like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too -rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the -tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, -in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent -impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of -"Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, -something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the -civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the -illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what -civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in -his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a -world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen -it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, -"until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating -sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut -Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, -and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted -nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim -of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of -life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol -promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that -is pathology. - -Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was -always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he -oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture -of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification -or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the -satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an -ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, -never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also -that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the -works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 -Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. -Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a -man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and -looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a -billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it -with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might -say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect -it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have -the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the -picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is -able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple -contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never -completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they -invariably led into this _cul-de-sac_. If life is really futile, then -writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make -life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility -is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it -might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it _is_ -full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present -sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never -attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in -the air. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -MUSTERED OUT - - - "... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the - others were all still asleep." DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI. - - -And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly -liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him -and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his -defeat. - -"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday -speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe -no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a -time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your -term, well or less well, and you are mustered out." - -What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon -his life? - -"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," -"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived -in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the -public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we -print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries -and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot -had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once -and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the -creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and -he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write -frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of -Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you -ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose -opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic -naïveté of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought -or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential -priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross -and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, -immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt -contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your -immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined -to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found -out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is -true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence -of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so -doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far -from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering -forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of -youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; -you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of -the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain -thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out." - -His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy -years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and -awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have -oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon -your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck -Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with -Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in -this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has -become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, -unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant -growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in -matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of -national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches -now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played -this rôle in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the -clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain -perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": -the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world -as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd -it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly -fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous -nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the -more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the -vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon -the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of -the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any -one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general -spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who -said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize -that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for -the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient -earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything -essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was -always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of -thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three -times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a -watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the -farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the -gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own -career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the -sort of courage he described in his story "Luck." - -"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so -little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak -out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he -continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same -seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor -(privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my -conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. -There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal -to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said -some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will -not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did -he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise -we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not -rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long -habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double -personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to -redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and -comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had -kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not -sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had -kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of -the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old -imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long -deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How -it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a -little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark -Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the -truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week -he found that he no longer had the strength. - -Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to -Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing -for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and -have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance -to write a book without reserves--a book which should take account of no -one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, -illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my -heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I -judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is -under way, now, and it _is_ a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book -was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing -it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his -desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil -upon the passion that possessed him. At once this craving reasserted -itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?" -He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his -friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he -felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire -still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind -on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a -mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path -out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he -writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden -emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous, -however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into -later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men -in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him": -there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth -now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth--anything that it would -hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored -the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother -Orion to write an autobiography that would spare nobody's feelings and -would let all the cats out of the bag: "Simply tell your story to -yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing," he -had told him. Let Orion do it! we can almost hear him whispering to -himself; and Orion had done it. "It wrung my heart," wrote Mr. Howells -of that astounding manuscript, "and I felt haggard after I had finished -it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had -found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was -himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as -Mr. Paine tells us, "a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even -his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down." To write such -a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed -what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for -autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for -confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to -redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something -unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who -spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in -the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of -himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and -plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be -mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom," -he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, -"because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with -theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; -you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm -and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's -indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells, -who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really -indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast -advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against -the sluice-gates of a human soul? - -At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to -be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his -autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he -has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter--the passage is to -be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my -seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six -hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published -in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish -and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall -continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It -is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some -folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons -mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is -something awful." - -You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has -been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a -debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things -about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to -shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about -her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three -"playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but -still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and -Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright -campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in -Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to -exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of -humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the -use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain -universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human -soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that -whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and -space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are -so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your -pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the -mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of -cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going -to have--what magnificently wicked fun! - -You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own -redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book -it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And -what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy -occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are -going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were -published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were -carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in -reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it -in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the -courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his -soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among -the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_ -gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been -dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have -thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I -am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on -paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired -when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I -should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike -them out when I came to revise this book." - -Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark -Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge -Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be -a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the -person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture -to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved -himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what -inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral -slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense -that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to -communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is -Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the -writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will -in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was -incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors. -There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, -if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of -founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at -Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market -value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; -but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was -not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without -the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his. -"It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is -nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys, -in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the -fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had -a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to -publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge -of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually -shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably -have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was -received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _exposé_ of -philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just, -that very generous public verdict--for the book is, in fact, quite -worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain--he must have -felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular rôle of a -Mephistopheles. - -With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the -repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that -civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen -from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference -and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported -by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm -heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and -oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of -the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable -corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in -South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; -Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the -Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering -the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark -Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of -the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive, -the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of -all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore -this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and -weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it -was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone -aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic -attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following -the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his -book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and -"A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against -bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him. -Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his -"Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the -forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit. -Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who -have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the -sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark -Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, -equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juarès and the -volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of -a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level, -and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his -animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and -despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself. - -The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his -energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or -another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly -destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a -will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my -feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on -paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become -definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his -great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can -doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks! -Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he -not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department -on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, -when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, -when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible -passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle -pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day -and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not -a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I -have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end -to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says? -Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human -race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was -it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for -means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian -Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy -frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack -upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the -failure in himself. - -And this failure was the failure of the artist in him. - -Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy -in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life -which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire -except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel, -and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old -masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with -anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it -and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I -have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to -do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort -would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what -had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious -sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The -Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime -creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator -of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an -impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born -artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist -destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in -the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious -he is, even this early, of all æsthetic pretensions! What a fierce -grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the -perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle, -he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all -Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of -tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the -peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a -low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark -Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; -he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is -the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to -desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp -unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously -desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, -why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to -produce only one himself, and that a failure. - -We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative -life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates -nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a -machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the -animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he -said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say -nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of -the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is -astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a -retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could -have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind. -But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging -his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off -the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in -the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults -him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in -Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle -expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to -believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon -knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer--see what Macaulay says! Macaulay, -heaven bless us all!--therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark -Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry -Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the -sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who -asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training -makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce -that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written. -But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel -Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had -not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can -hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to -follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession -revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on -faith. - -How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of -his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently -that it was "like the sky--you can't break through anywhere." How much -it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an -irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to -do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in -Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius -is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its -eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior -circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, -upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his -intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for -the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe -with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and -unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no -outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no -outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a -valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would -have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced -something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, -associations and training. In France he would have produced something -better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and -training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to -Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is -enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we -can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking -reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his -half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as -"large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age. - -Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that -we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order -to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, -destroy us, we embrace them with an _amor fati_, to escape from the -contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave -who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, -finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the -possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself. -The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly -temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, -nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep -emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it -honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the -slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and -thirst for freedom. - -Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential -force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in -Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that -fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If -the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in -fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for -greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued -against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will: -he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a -will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose -regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no -spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where -success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is -a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place -of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the -first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be -weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that -Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it -is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How -well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain! -"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human -being is under training. It is his human environment which influences -his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his -road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself -shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval -he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the -way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the -tragedy of it. - -Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark -Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human -mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine -anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a -single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind -from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind -carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which -act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All -day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and -without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 -thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before -his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain -cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as -the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and -controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental -machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of -ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any -help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the -multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen -minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases. -It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite -of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely -independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better -have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark -Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, -chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks -and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't -listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and -wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of -personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, -that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in -these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with -each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book -regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch -inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal -conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the -end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul! - -The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary -psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance. -And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express -through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I -generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not -those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these -"three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me -at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in -the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life -that has been unfolded in these pages. - -"There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being -in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a -living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about -those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought -that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I -am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell -whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. - -"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to -the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am -always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be -funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only -making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they -commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing -there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." - -I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas -that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark -Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to -think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought -of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow," -the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself -inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second -dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing -self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream -worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always -"trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has -lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great -surrender. - -Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment -when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda -packet: - -"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which -the title-rôle of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of -this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The -other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon -him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at -me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out -of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't -want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always -expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'" - -No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have -had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; -but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for -good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess -alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity -of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said -Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks -and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have -ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born -artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that -he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be -"original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship -even over his neckties--the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, -has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily! - -And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about -on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most -ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, -the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by -all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic -sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the -end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an -illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the -creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those -three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of -conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is -the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own -conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He -was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that -has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for -missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says -John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, -"who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of -things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the -end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability -begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new -turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces -of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confrères -have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask -yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and -walk the stage as poets do. - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42225-0.txt or 42225-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/2/2/42225/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - -BY - -VAN WYCK BROOKS - - -"_Think it over, dear B--! A man's gifts are_ -_not a property: they are a duty."_ - ---IBSEN'S _Letters_ - - -1922 - -LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN - - - - -TO E.S.B. - - - - -CONTENTS - - - - I. INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - II. THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - III. THE GILDED AGE - IV. IN THE CRUCIBLE - V. THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - VI. EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - VII. THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - VIII. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - IX. MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - X. LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - XI. MUSTERED OUT - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - - - - -CHAPTER I - -INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - - - "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the - deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the - race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and - for the same reason."--_Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's - books._ - - -To those who are interested in American life and letters there has been -no question of greater significance, during the last few years, than the -pessimism of Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his own -friends and contemporaries were rather inclined to make light of his -oft-expressed belief that man is the meanest of the animals and life a -tragic mistake. - -For some time before his death Mark Twain had appeared before the public -in the rôle less of a laughing philosopher than of a somewhat gloomy -prophet of modern civilization. But he was old and he had suffered many -misfortunes and the progress of society is not a matter for any one to -be very jubilant about: to be gloomy about the world is a sort of -prerogative of those who have lived long and thought much. The public -that had grown old with him could hardly, therefore, accept at its face -value a point of view that seemed to be contradicted by so many of the -facts of Mark Twain's life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him -intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of -his "pose" regarding "the damned human race," and we know the opinion of -his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was "not a pessimist in his -heart, but only by premeditation." These views were apparently borne out -by his own testimony. "My temperament," he wrote, shortly after the -death of his daughter Jean, "has never allowed my spirits to remain -depressed long at a time." That he remained active and buoyant to the -end was, in fact, for his associates, sufficient evidence that his -philosophical despair was only an anomaly, which had no organic part in -the structure of his life. - -Was it not natural that they should feel thus about him, those -contemporaries of his, so few of whom had seen his later writings and -all the tell-tale private memoranda which Mr. Paine has lately given to -the world? What a charmed life was Mark Twain's, after all! To be able -to hold an immense nation in the hollow of one's hand, to be able to -pour out into millions of sympathetic ears, with calm confidence, as -into the ears of a faithful friend, all the private griefs and intimate -humors of a lifetime, to be called "the King" by those one loves, to be -so much more than a king in reality that every attack of gout one has is -"good for a column" in the newspapers and every phrase one utters -girdles the world in twenty minutes, to be addressed as "the Messiah of -a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents"--what -more could Tom Sawyer, at least, have wished than that? And Mark Twain's -fame was not merely one of sentiment. If the public heart was moved by -everything that concerned him,--an illness in his household, a new -campaign against political corruption, a change of residence, and he was -deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won -the world's pity when he got into debt and the world's praise when he -got out of it, he was no sort of nine days' wonder; his country had made -him its "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in -appointing himself, as he said, "ambassador-at-large of the United -States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all -official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over "The -Innocents Abroad" and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices -to the day when the newspapers were freely proposing that he ought to -have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the -Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first -time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and -private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and -his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his -opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a -sort of incarnation of the character and quality of modern America. -"Everywhere he moved," says Mr. Paine, "a world revolved about him." In -London, in Vienna, his apartments were a court, and traffic rules were -modified to let him pass in the street. A charmed life, surely, when we -consider, in addition to this public acclaim, the tidal waves of wealth -that flowed in upon him again and again, the intense happiness of his -family relations, and the splendid recognition of those fellow-members -of his craft whose word to him was final--Kipling, who "loved to think -of the great and godlike Clemens," and Brander Matthews, who freely -compared him with the greatest writers of history, and Bernard Shaw, who -announced that America had produced just two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe -and Mark Twain. Finally, there was Mr. Howells, "the recognized critical -Court of Last Resort in this country," as he called him. Did not Mr. -Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: "Your foundations -are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, -and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"? - -The spectators of this drama could hardly have been expected to take -the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously, and all the more because he -totally refuted the old and popular notion that humorists are always -melancholy. I have already quoted the remark he made about his -temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life, four months -before his own death. It is borne out by all the evidence of all his -years. He was certainly not one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue -natures, those June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day -long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He was an August nature, -given to sudden storms and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with -electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, -and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he -was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child -in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter -where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope -preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine -temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," -he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this -footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly _happy_ -than I am I defy the world to produce him and _prove_ him." And it seems -always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in his triumphs on the -platform or indulging his "rainbow-hued impulses" on paper, we see him -again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he was -expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress assembled, -"happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in -his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: -"Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know -my temperament"? - -And his physical health was just what one might expect from this, from -his immense vitality. He was subject to bronchial colds and he had -intermittent attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his health -appears to have been as perfect as his energy was inexhaustible. "I have -been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years," he writes -in 1875; from all one gathers he might have made the same statement -twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at fifty, at -sixty, at seventy--during that extraordinary period, well within the -memory of people who are still young, when he had solved his financial -difficulties by going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine says, -"like a debutante in her first season,"--the days when people called him -"the Belle of New York": "By half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had -danced all those people down--and yet was not tired, merely breathless. -I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at -work on this letter to you." And again, the next year, his sixtieth -year, when he had been playing billiards with H.H. Rogers, until Rogers -looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you ever get tired?": "I was -able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like. Don't you -remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the -villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I -get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one -daylight nap since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testimony -of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, during the last five -years of his life when, even at seventy-four, he was still playing -billiards "9 hours a day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human -being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a -young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the -night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh -and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He -smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the -billiard-table with the light step of youth. At 3 or 4 o'clock in the -morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my -weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of -his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least -suggestion of fatigue." - -Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his intimates, had ever -in their eyes,--this darling of all the gods. No wonder they were -inclined to take his view of "the damned human race" as rather a -whimsical pose; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it so even -if they had known, generally known, that he had a way of referring in -private to "God's most elegant invention" as not only "damned" but also -"mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are always supposed to be -that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about -the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an -abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to -explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its -stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and -Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment." -All his closest friends were accustomed to little notes like this: "I -have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing -that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and -hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put -in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race." -Might not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that? - -Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's writings which only a -succeeding generation can really have, it might be possible to explain -in this objective way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism -which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The change in tone -between the poetry of the first half of "Life on the Mississippi" and -the dull notation of the latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp -Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," -with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," -that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, -along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the -reader for taking his text at its face value--all this might be -attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and -family sorrow. If he was always manifesting, in word and deed, his deep -belief that life is inevitably a process of deterioration,--well, did -not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it not, is it not, a -popular American dogma that "the baddest children are better than the -goodest men"? A race of people who feel this way could not have thought -there was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims like these: - - If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he - will not bite you. This is the principal difference between - a dog and a man. - - It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to - hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other - to get the news to you. - -They could hardly have been surprised at the bitter, yes, even the -vindictive, mockery of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," at Mark -Twain's definition of man as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted -neither "to supply the coffee nor turn the crank," at his recurring -"plan" to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the -air for a period of two minutes. - -Has not the American public, with its invincible habit of "turning -hell's back-yard into a playground," gone so far even as to discount -"The Mysterious Stranger," that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole -of cruel nonsense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank -assertion that slavery, hypocrisy and cowardice are the eternal destiny -of man? Professor Stuart P. Sherman, who likes to defend the views of -thirty years ago and sometimes seems to forget that all traditions are -not of equal validity, says of this book that it "lets one into a -temperament and character of more gravity, complexity and interest than -the surfaces indicated." But having made this discovery, for he is -openly surprised, Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and -unexpected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had known before: "What -Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in monarchies, -aristocracies, tribal religions and--minorities bent on mischief, and -making a bludgeon of the malleable many." And, after all, he says, "the -wicked world visited by the mysterious stranger is sixteenth century -Austria--not these States." But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in -reality Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through -whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations of Huck Finn and Tom -Sawyer, those characters which, as we know from a hundred evidences, -haunted Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any rate, Mark -Twain's boys, and whoever compares their moral attitude with that of the -boys of Mark Twain's prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into -his soul. "We boys wanted to warn them"--Marget and Ursula, against the -danger that was gathering about them--"but we backed down when it came -to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor -brave enough to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get us into trouble." What, is this Mark Twain speaking, the -creator of Huck and Tom, who gladly broke every law of the tribe to -protect and rescue Nigger Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly enough nor -brave enough" to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get them into trouble? Can we, in the light of this, continue to -say that Mark Twain's pessimism was due to anything so external as the -hatred of tyranny, and a sixteenth century Austrian tyranny at that? Is -it not perfectly plain that that deep contempt for man, the -"coffee-mill," a contempt that has spread now even to the boy-nature of -which Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have had some -far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate -chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not -the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no -relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist: - - Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. - - All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange - complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to - live. - - Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all - his others--his last breath. - -And that paragraph about the death of his daughter, so utterly -inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes to himself: "My life is a -bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most -precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor ---death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to -life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; -and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions, to -one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that: but at least one of -them is that, not to the writer's apprehension, but in the writer's -experience, life has been in some special way a vain affliction. - -Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of Mark Twain's -pessimism? Can we attribute it, with Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt -under which he labored now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the -death of those he loved? No, for these things would have modified his -temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, -checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of -brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own -testimony, the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever knew, he -lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of life he had neither more -nor less than other men, and they affected him neither more nor less. To -say anything else would be to contradict the whole record of his -personality. - -No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted Mark Twain, a -malady common to many Americans, perhaps, if we are to judge from that -excessive interest in therapeutics which he shared with so many millions -of his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark Twain's later -history which has received too little attention. "Whether it was -copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice," -says Mr. Paine--to approach this subject on its broadest side--"he -rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would -provide physical or mental easement for his species." And here again the -general leads to the particular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender -heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts -of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he -and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near -losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in -their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that -momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor -Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method -that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles -about it, bombarding his friends with letters of appreciation and -recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave -most of his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea for all -human ills which osteopathy could not reach." There was Christian -Science to which, in spite of his attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat -equivocal book he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and -as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest converts," who -"never lost faith in its power." And lastly, there was the "eclectic -therapeutic doctrine" which he himself put together piecemeal from all -the others, to the final riddance of _materia medica_. - -We have seen what Mark Twain's apparent health was. Can we say that this -therapeutic obsession was due to the illnesses of his family, which -were, indeed, unending? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant -stimulus to the obsession--the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine," for -instance, did, quite definitely, rise up out of the midst of them. But -it is plain that there had to be an element of "soul-cure" in these -various healings for Mark Twain to be interested in them, that what -interested him in them _was_ the "soul-cure," the "mind-cure." Can he -say too much in praise of Christian Science for its "healing of the -spirit," its gift of "buoyant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from -care"? In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental healing -began at a time when he and his family alike were free from illness. It -is in 1886, when Mark Twain was at the very, summit of his fame, when he -was the most successful publisher in the world, when he was at work on -his most ambitious book, when he was "frightened," as he said, at the -proportions of his prosperity, when his household was aglow with -happiness and well-being, that his daughter Susy notes in her diary: -"Papa has been very much interested of late in the 'mind-cure' theory." -It might be added that he was about at the age when, according to his -famous aphorism, a man who does not become a pessimist knows too little -about life. - -In fact, the more one scans the later pages of Mark Twain's history the -more one is forced to the conclusion that there was something gravely -amiss with his inner life. There was that frequently noted fear of -solitude, that dread of being alone with himself which made him, for -example, beg for just one more game of billiards at 4 o'clock in the -morning. There were those "daily self-eludings" that led him to slay his -own conscience in one of the most ferocious of his humorous tales. That -conscience of his--what was it? Why do so many of his jokes turn upon an -affectation, let us say, of moral cowardice in himself? How does it -happen that when he reads "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him "with -force" is Tito's compromise with his conscience? Why those continual -fits of remorse, those fantastic self-accusations in which he charged -himself, we are told, with having filled Mrs. Clemens's life with -privations, in which he made himself responsible first for the death of -his younger brother and later for that of his daughter Susy, writing to -his wife, according to Mr. Paine, that he was "wholly and solely -responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality -his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-fall, the -separation from Susy, and this final, incredible disaster"? Was there -any reason why, humorously or otherwise, he should have spoken of -himself as a liar, why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of -writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I went on now and took -him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in -literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"? -That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made him come to think -of literature as primarily, perhaps, the confession of sins--was there -anything in the moral point of view of his generation to justify it, in -this greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business, this zealous -reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be -cheaply persuadable" was, he said, the first command the Deity ever -issued to a human being on this planet, the only command Adam would -never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin of one of his -books: "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep -and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he -despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same reason." - -A strange enigma! "You observe," wrote Mark Twain once, almost at the -beginning of his career, "that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." That -spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The restless -movement of his life, those continual journeys to Bermuda, where "the -deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and -give his conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an -autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible," which -would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt -alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense -relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of -limitations--you have served your term, well or less well, and you are -mustered out"--how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? -For Mark Twain was right--things do not happen by chance, and the -psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain -respects that other sort of determinism in which he so almost -fanatically believed. There is no figure for the human being like the -ship, he sometimes said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his -contemporaries, just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory -of that last English welcome, the _Begum_ of Bengal, stateliest of -Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it -merely an irony of circumstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of -storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea? - -No, there was a reason for Mark Twain's pessimism, a reason for that -chagrin, that fear of solitude, that tortured conscience, those -fantastic self-accusations, that indubitable self-contempt. It is an -established fact, if I am not mistaken, that these morbid feelings of -sin, which have no evident cause, are the result of having transgressed -some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one's nature. It is as old as -Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest -that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his -was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked -personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost -wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The -spirit of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from the -bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had never quite been -able to possess. - -Does this seem too rash a hypothesis? It is, I know, the general -impression that Mark Twain quite fully effectuated himself as a writer. -Mr. Howells called him the "Lincoln of our literature," Professor -William Lyon Phelps describes him as one of the supreme novelists of the -world, Professor Brander Matthews compares him with Cervantes, and -Bernard Shaw said to him once: "I am persuaded that the future historian -of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French -historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." These were views -current in Mark Twain's lifetime, and similar views are common enough -to-day. "Mark Twain," says Professor Archibald Henderson, "enjoys the -unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening -and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual -powers from the beginning to the end." To Mr. John Macy, author of what -is, on the whole, the most discerning book that has been written on our -literature, he is "a powerful, original thinker." And finally, Mr. H.L. -Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There -was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof -engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one -associates with the great artists of the Renaissance." An imposing array -of affirmations, surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few -years, during which he has become in a way so much more interesting, -have witnessed a singular change in Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly -present he is in the public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort -of archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not -continue so to be for many generations to comet Undoubtedly. By whom, -however, with the exception of two or three of his books, is he read? -Mr. Paine, I know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this day in -America in larger quantity than any other book of travel. But a number -of explanations might be given for this, as for any other mob -phenomenon, none of which has anything to do with literary fame in the -proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by the delight and -stimulus which he gives to mature spirits in the present, and time, it -seems to me, tends to bear out the assertion of Henry James that Mark -Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry Finn," -"Tom Sawyer," a story or two like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a -sketch or two like "Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of -"Life on the Mississippi,"--these, in any case, can already be said to -have "survived" all his other work. And are these writings, however -beautiful and important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic -genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes? -Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that prevails to-day when he -called their author the "divine amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" -and "Tom Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent, as -complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality." - -So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not -been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled -almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him? When -his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, they -were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they -had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a -creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his -prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of -his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique -magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot -help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American -writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like -Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if -intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth -to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his -associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian -would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the -horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of -one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what -Mr. Howells says: "Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities -that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final -personality was something exquisite." That combination of barbaric force -and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him--is there not -about it something portentous, something that suggests the true lord of -life? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic -atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were -the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their -impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one -of the fixed stars had fallen in space. - -This was the force, this the energy which, through Mark Twain's pen, -found such inadequate expression. He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a -"divine amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called -it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way -of saying, in the latter case, that his was a mind that had not -developed, and in the former, that his was a splendid genius which had -never found itself? - -It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own self-estimate. His -judgments were, as Mr. Paine says, "always unsafe": strictly speaking, -he never knew what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the -time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against -his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark -Twain's estimate of himself it is no conscious judgment of his career -one has in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the judgment of his -unconscious self. This he revealed unawares in all sorts of ways. - -There were times when he seemed to share the complacent confidence of so -many others in his immortal fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his -large, loose, easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live a -couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a -fresh start and live the rest of the time." And Mr. Paine says that as -early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers a -contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one -hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with -his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this -must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty -confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain -was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he -did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of -megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest -rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous -episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I -wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, -I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American -writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident -in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it became a -historic event: it was for him, plainly, of an exceptional significance, -and all his love for gorgeous trappings could never account for the -delight he had in that doctor's gown--"I would dress that way all the -time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine--which became for him a permanent -robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain at seventy-two, one of the most -celebrated men in the world, could not have cared so much for it if it -had been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must have served -in some way also to vindicate him in his own eyes; he seized upon it as -a sort of talisman, as a reassurance from what he considered the highest -court of culture, that he really was one of the elect. - -Yes, that naïve passion for the limelight, for "walking with kings" and -hobnobbing with job lots of celebrities, that "revelling," as Mr. Paine -calls it, "in the universal tribute"--what was its root if not a deep -sense of insecurity, a desire for approval both in his own eyes and in -the eyes of all the world? During those later years in New York, when he -had become so much the professional celebrity, he always timed his -Sunday morning walks on Fifth Avenue for about the hour when the -churches were out. Mr. Paine tells how, on the first Sunday morning, he -thoughtlessly suggested that they should turn away at Fifty-ninth Street -in order to avoid the throng and that Clemens quietly remarked, "I like -the throng." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the Plaza Hotel until -the appointed hour.... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid -the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on -which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was -lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the -multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as -the tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for approval and -corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a -quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted -his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"? -Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obsession: kings, -empresses, princes, archduchesses--what a part they play in his -biography! He is always dragging them in, into his stories, into his -letters, writing about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them, -and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals they have. And as -with kings, so also with great men, or men who were considered great, or -men who were merely notorious. He makes lists of those he has known, -those he has spent evenings with--Mark Twain, to whom celebrity was the -cheapest thing going! Is there not in all this the suggestion of an -almost conscious weakness clutching at strength, the suggestion of some -kind of failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of success? - -Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this same desire for -approval, for corroboration. Mark Twain was supported by the sentiment -of the majority, which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he had -the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the arbiter of all the -elegances; he had virtually the freedom of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and -not only its freedom but a higher rate of payment than any other -_Atlantic_ contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more -reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as -good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells -in 1887, "but I've always done what I could to secure and enlarge my -good opinion of it. I've always said to, myself, 'Everybody reads it and -that's something--it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable -people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by -implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and -fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, -high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody -likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a -note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the -sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, -beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He -rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an -uplifter of the masses; then, with a touch of mock-noble indignation, he -confesses to being a popular entertainer, fully convinced at least that -there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed -to put upon his book an explanatory line: "This is written for the -Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the Members." No plea more -grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great -reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant -of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a -separation between the "Head" and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, -had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for -the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it. - -Mark Twain, in short, knew very well--for I think these illustrations -prove it--that there was something decidedly different between himself -and a great writer. In that undifferentiated mob of celebrities, great, -and less great, and far from great, amid which he moved for a -generation, he was a favored equal. But in the intimate presence of some -isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the -candidate for the mystagogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow -writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude. Was it Browning? -He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied -for a time with the naïve self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen? -Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin note-books: "Been taken -for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was -found the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses the word -"literature" in connection with his own work it is with a sudden -self-consciousness that lets one into the secret of his inner humility. -"I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever -been given a degree by any college in any age of the world, so far as I -know," he writes to the authorities of Yale in 1888. A man who freely -compared himself with the melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, -who, in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins," invited his readers, -who already knew how "the born and trained novelist works," to see how -the "jack-leg" does it, could never have been accused of not knowing his -true rank. "You and I are but sewing-machines," he says in "What Is -Man?" "We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care -nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out -Gobelins." - -I think we are in a position now to understand that boundless comic -impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic impudence which led him to propose -to Edwin Booth in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him to -telegraph to W.T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to -disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now"; which -led him, at the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum, "Why am -I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was -just asking for information." Tempting Providence, was he not, this -child of good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the fates. If -he had not had a certain sense of colossal force, it would never have -occurred to him, however humorously, to place himself on an equality -with Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the Czar and his -magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean. But, on the other hand, it -would never have occurred to him to make these comparisons if he had -felt himself in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are not -only great in energy but masters of themselves let their work speak for -them; men who are not masters of themselves, whose energy, however -great, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are -driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration -from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured -that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare -and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great -fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet -they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure -themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, -therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually -was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which -had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy -that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply -of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable -abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined -with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the -barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of -that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes -one's sole criterion the magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, -ever more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life Mark Twain -was attended by what Mr. Paine calls "psychic evidences"; he never fails -to note the marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is -always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"--he -invented the phrase; strange phenomena of nature rise up in his path. -Three times, while crossing the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each -time he takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the barbarian -conquerors of antiquity, I say, those essential opposites of the -creative spirit, whose control is altogether internal, and who feels -himself the master of his own fate, could have been more in character -than was Mark Twain when he observed, a few months before his death: "I -came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I -expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my -life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no -doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable; freaks, they came in -together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." - -A comet, this time! And a few pages back we found him comparing himself -with a sewing-machine. Which is he, one, or the other, or both? He seems -to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of -extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty -solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, -confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed -to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains. A great -genius, in short, that has never attained the inner control which makes -genius great, a mind that has not found itself, a mind that does not -know itself, a spirit that cloaks to the end in the fantasy of its -temporal power the tragic reality of its own essential miscarriage! - -We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret of Mark Twain's -mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy of that little book which he -called his "Bible," "What Is Man?" He was extremely proud of the -structure of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a machine, -"moved, directed, commanded by _exterior_ influences, _solely_," that he -is "a chameleon, who takes the color of his place of resort," that he is -"a mere coffee-mill," which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee -nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of proprietary interest and -pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he -says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving -impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--and is merely a machine and -entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly -possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in -patching and painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession -and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging -fact approaches." You see how it pleases him, how much it means to him, -that final "Truth," how he clings to it with a sort of defiant insolence -against the "imploring argument," the "damaging fact"? "Man originates -nothing," he says, "not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. -He was a machine, and machines do not create." Faith never gave the -believer more comfort than this philosophy gave Mark Twain. - -But is it possible for a creative mind to find "contentment" in denying -the possibility of creation? And why should any one find pride and -satisfaction in the belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the -denial of "free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and the sour -grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and tragic souls who find -comfort in saying that love exists nowhere in the world because they -themselves have missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark -Twain any pleasure to feel that he was "entitled to no personal merit" -for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he -felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of -feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to -achieve--namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, -"Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the -world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the -creative life is the very embodiment of it--the emergence, that is to -say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant, integrating -principle that turns the world he confronts into a mere instrument for -the registration of his own preferences. There is but one -interpretation, consequently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight -in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine: it brought him -comfort to feel that if he was, as he said, a "sewing-machine," it was -the doing of destiny, and that nothing he could have done himself would -have enabled him to "turn out Gobelins." - -From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that Mark Twain was a -frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development, and beyond this -fact, as we know from innumerable instances the psychologists have -placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of -his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even been -turned, as we shall see; against himself; the poet, the artist in him, -consequently, had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a -spiritual valetudinarian. - -But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to glance not only -at Mark Twain's life and work, but also at the epoch and the society in -which he lived. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - - "One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is - dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, - but they are essentially not happy," - - STENDHAL: _On Love in the United States_. - - -In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, -revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather -material for his book, "Life on the Mississippi." It was, naturally, a -profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what -his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an -assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot -of the steamer _Gold Dust_ recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the -pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We -got to be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most of my -time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a -big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of -the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her -most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me -there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been -no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a -pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." - -Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant, that Mark Twain -recorded in these words, a regret for the passing of time and the charm -and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his -"literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not altogether flattering -to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to -ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely "happy and -care-free" a man of Mark Twain's energy and power could hardly, in later -life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he certainly did: all his -days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a -lost paradise. "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done -in my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am a person," he -wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, "who would quit authorizing in a minute to -go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we -see; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, -that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only -by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact -that the earlier pages of "Life on the Mississippi," in which he -pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and -expressive that he ever wrote. - -It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong hankering for the -lost paradise of the pilot-house. It was something more organic, and -Mark Twain provides us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my -subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his book, "it is no -surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have -followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it." A singular -statement for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life, the -two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are nothing else than love -and pride! But Mark Twain writes those words with an almost unctuous -gravity of conviction, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a -pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had -not experienced it in literature. Strange as that may seem, we cannot -question it; we have, simply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi -pilot had, in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist in -him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in him had never been -satisfied again. We do not have to look beyond this in order to -interpret, if not the fact, at least the obsession. He felt that, in -some way, he had been as a pilot on the right track; and he felt that he -had lost this track. If he was always harking back to that moment, then, -it was, we can hardly escape feeling, with a vague hope of finding again -some scent that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious thread -of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it possible that he had, in -fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that -career? It is a bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark -Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to see first what sort -of boy he was, and what sort of society it was he grew up in; then we -shall be able to understand what unique opportunities for personal -growth the career of a pilot afforded him. - -What a social setting it was, that little world into which Mark Twain -was born! It was drab, it was tragic. In "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom -Sawyer" we see it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a -later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled in Hannibal, on -the Mississippi. He was five at the time; his eyes had opened on such a -scene as we find in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary, -discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he -says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, -desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, -wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in -some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"--it is the epic not only -of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. -How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the -scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E.H. Howe's "Story -of a Country Town," for instance, that Western counterpart in sodden -misery of "Ethan Frome"--a book which has only begun to find its public. -This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest, tells us in so -many words that in all his early days he never saw a woman who was not -anæmic and fretful, a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who -was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment. No wonder he has -come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is -no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain -himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, -dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and -foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, -some gigantic garbage-can! Human nature was not responsible for this -debris of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could human nature -rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and murder," we are told, were the -diversions of the capital city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. -It was not very different in normal times along the Mississippi. -Hannibal was a small place; yet Mr. Paine records four separate murders -which Mark Twain actually witnessed as a boy: every week he would see -some drunken ruffian run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, -he saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many gruesome -experiences," exclaims Mr. Paine, "there appear to have been in those -early days!" But let us be moderate: every one was not violent. As for -the majority of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that history -calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion, justice will never be -realistic. The gods of Greece would have gone unwashed and turned gray -at forty and lost their digestion and neglected their children if they -had been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into an irritable -silence. - -A desert of human sand!--the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, -for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions -after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his -letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a -dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities -may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of -existence inevitably droop and wither." - -Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his -mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of -Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with -John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain -"did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are -told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he -seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a -perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of -his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon -him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking -"sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. -Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent -medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals--we have it from "Tom -Sawyer"--"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were -all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, -desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, -without enough power, grating on their own metal. - -Little Sam, as every one called him, was the fifth child in this -household, "a puny baby with a wavering promise of life"; it is -suggested that he was not wanted. Mr. Paine speaks of him somewhere as -"high-strung and neurotic." We are not surprised, therefore, to find him -at three and four "a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies -that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a -series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as -he lay rolling in the grass." This is the child who is to retain through -life that exquisite sensibility of which so many observers have spoken. -"Once when I met him in the country," says Mr. Howells, for example, of -his later life, "he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in -bringing down a blackbird; and he described the poor, stricken, glossy -thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as -he might have given a wounded child." Already, in his infancy, his -gentle, winning manner and smile make him every one's favorite. A very -special little flower of life, you see, capable of such feeling that at -twenty-three his hair is to turn gray in the tragic experience of his -brother's death. A flower of life, a wild flower, and infinitely -fragile: the doctor is always being called in his behalf. Before he -grows up he is to have prophetic dreams, but now another neurotic -symptom manifests itself. In times of family crisis, at four, when one -of his sisters is dying, at twelve, after the death of his father, he -walks in his sleep: often the rest of the household get up in the middle -of the night to find this delicate little waif with his eyes shut -"fretting with cold in some dark corner." - -Can we not already see in this child the born, predestined artist? And -what sort of nurture will his imagination have? He is abandoned to the -fervid influences of the negro slaves,--for his father had moments of a -relative prosperity. Crouching in their cabins, he drinks in wild, weird -tales of blood-curdling African witchcraft. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, -"an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination -of a delicate child." One thinks indeed of an image that would have -pleased Heine, the image of a frail snow-plant of the North quivering, -flaming in the furnace of the jungle. Mark Twain appears to have been -from the outset a center of interest, radiating a singular potency; and -the more his spirit was subjected to such a fearful stimulus the more -urgently he required for his normal development the calm, clairvoyant -guidance a pioneer child could never have had. The negroes were "in real -charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment." What other -influence was there to counter-balance this? - -One, and one only, an influence tragic in its ultimate consequences, the -influence of Mark Twain's mother. That poor, taciturn, sunstruck -failure, John Clemens, was a mere pathetic shadow beside the woman whose -portrait Mark Twain has drawn for us in the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer." -She who was regarded as a "character" by all the town, who was said to -have been "the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best -dancer, in all Kentucky," who was still able to dance at 80, and lived -to be 87, who belonged, in short, to "the long-lived, energetic side of -the house," directed her children, we are told--and we can believe -it--"with considerable firmness." And what was the inevitable -relationship between her and this little boy? "She had a weakness," says -Mr. Paine, "for the child that demanded most of her mother's care.... -All were tractable and growing in grace but little Sam ... a delicate -little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed." In -later life, "you gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she told -him. In fact, she was always scolding him, comforting him, forgiving -him, punishing and pleading with him, fixing her attention upon him, -exercising her emotions about him, impressing it upon his mind for all -time, as we shall come to see that woman is the inevitable seat of -authority and the fount of wisdom. - -We know that such excessive influences are apt to deflect the growth of -any spirit. Men are like planets in this, that for them to sail clear in -their own orbits the forces of gravity have to be disposed with a -certain balance on all sides: how often, when the father counts for -nothing, a child becomes the satellite of its mother, especially when -that mother's love has not found its normal expression in her own youth! -We have seen that Mark Twain's mother did not love her husband; that her -capacity for love, however, was very great is proved by the singular -story revealed in one of Mark Twain's letters: more than sixty years -after she had quarreled with that young Lexington doctor, and when her -husband had long been dead, she, a woman of eighty or more, took a -railway journey to a distant city where there was an Old Settlers' -convention because among the names of those who were to attend it she -had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. "Who could have imagined -such a heart-break as that?" said Mr. Howells, when he heard the story. -"Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no -more noise than a grave under foot." It made no noise, but it -undoubtedly had a prodigious effect upon Mark Twain's life. When an -affection as intense as that is balked in its direct path and repressed -it usually, as we know, finds an indirect outlet; and it is plain that -the woman as well as the mother expressed itself in the passionate -attachment of Jane Clemens to her son. We shall note many consequences -of this fact as we go on with our story. We can say at least at this -point that Mark Twain was, quite definitely, in his mother's -leading-strings. - -What was the inevitable result? I have said, not, I hope, with too much -presumption, that Mark Twain had already shown himself the born, -predestined artist, that his whole nature manifested what is called a -tendency toward the creative life. For that tendency to become -conscious, to become purposive, two things were necessary: it must be -able, in the first place, to assert itself and in the second place to -embody itself in a vocation; to realize itself and then to educate -itself, to realize itself in educating itself. And, as we know, the -influences of early childhood are, in these matters, vitally important. -If Jane Clemens had been a woman of wide experience and independent -mind, in proportion to the strength of her character, Mark Twain's -career might have been wholly different. Had she been catholic in her -sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no matter how more than -maternal her attachment to her son was, she might have placed before him -and encouraged him to pursue interests and activities amid which he -could eventually have recovered his balance, reduced the filial bond to -its normal measure and stood on his own feet. But that is to wish for a -type of woman our old pioneer society could never have produced. We are -told that the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer" is a speaking portrait of Jane -Clemens, and Aunt Polly, as we know, was the symbol of all the taboos. -The stronger her will was, the more comprehensive were her repressions, -the more certainly she became the inflexible guardian of tradition in a -social régime where tradition was inalterably opposed to every sort of -personal deviation from the accepted type. "In their remoteness from -'the political centers of the young Republic," says Mr. Howells, in "The -Leatherwood God," of these old Middle Western settlements, "they seldom -spoke of the civic; questions stirring the towns of the East; the -commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were; -unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest." And in the slave -States it was not the abolitionist alone whose name was held, as Mr. -Paine says, "in horror," but every one who had the audacity to think -differently from his neighbors. Jane Clemens, in short, was the -embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism which had proved -so favorable to the life of enterprising action but which perceived the -scent of the devil in any least expression of what is now known as the -creative impulse. She had a kind heart, she was always repenting and -softening and forgiving; it is said that whenever she had to drown -kittens, she warmed the water first. But this, without opening any -channel in a contrary direction, only sealed her authority! She won her -points as much by kindness as by law. Besides, tradition spoke first in -her mind; her hand was quicker than her heart; in action she was the -madonna of the hairbrush. And what, specifically, was it that she -punished? Those furtive dealings of Huck and Tom with whitewash and -piracy were nothing in the world--and that is why all the world loves -them--but the first stirrings of the normal æsthetic sense, the first -stirrings of individuality. - -Already I think we divine what was bound to happen in the soul of Mark -Twain. The story of "Huckleberry Finn" turns, as we remember, upon a -conflict: "the author," says Mr. Paine, "makes Huck's struggle a -psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and -sympathy on the other." In the famous episode of Nigger Jim, "sympathy," -the cause of individual freedom, wins. Years later, in "The Mysterious -Stranger," Mark Twain presented the parallel situation we noted in the -last chapter: "we found," says the boy who tells that story, "that we -were not manly enough, nor brave enough to do a generous action when -there was a chance that it could get us into trouble." Conscience and -the law, we see, had long since prevailed in the spirit of Mark Twain, -but what is the conscience of a boy who checks a humane impulse but "boy -terror," as Mr. Paine calls it, an instinctive fear of custom, of tribal -authority? The conflict in "Huckleberry Finn" is simply the conflict of -Mark Twain's own childhood. He solved it successfully, he fulfilled his -desire, in the book, as an author can. In actual life he did not solve -it at all; he surrendered. - -Turn to the record in Mr. Paine's biography. We find Mark Twain in -perpetual revolt against all those institutions for which his mother -stood. "Church ain't worth shucks," says Tom Sawyer. As for school, "he -never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and -remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything -resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of -liberty." One recalls what Huck said of Aunt Polly just before he made -his escape to the woods: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she - won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air get through 'em somehow, and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - -But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally or in any other -way. He never even imagined that his feelings of revolt had any -justification. We remember how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some -escapade, they would resolve to "lead a better life" to go to church, -visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and subsist wholly upon -tracts. That was what Mark Twain did: "not to do so," says, Mr. Paine, -"was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were -heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that." -And his mother was so strong, so courageous, the only strong and -courageous influence he knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he -set them down"--the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and -beaten and sold--"as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a -taste for a better life." Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence -himself, not to play with freedom! "He felt that it was his own -conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's -idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions." Naturally! And -she "punished him and pleaded with him, alternately"--with one -inevitable result. "'To fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote -to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly described that old feeling which -I used to have"; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a -preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be -damned." Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and -preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had -become in his eyes the "bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to -mention the creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"? - -Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and -flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. -Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other -traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities--how can we compare -the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, -horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell -of his infancy and find a vocation there? Calvinism itself had gone to -seed: it was nothing but the dead hand of custom; the flaming priest had -long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he -could find nowhere, either in men or in books, the bread and wine of the -spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, -Frank Burrough, who had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is -record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named -Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincinnati. "They were long fermenting -discourses," Mr. Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to -that winter in Macfarlane's room." And what was the counsel which, from -that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received?--that "man's -heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only -animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness" and that his -intellect was only a "depraving addition to him which, in the end, -placed him in a rank far below the other beasts." Propitious words for -this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with -books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is a memorable picture of the -library in the typical gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to -New Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering," "Affection's -Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa," "Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's -Book," "piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an -inherited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the cultural -background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh -stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the -foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark -Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, -which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half -a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. -"It gave him his cue," says Mr. Paine, "the first word of a part in the -human drama," and he conceived a sudden interest in history and -languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the -least protection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of -fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke. - -In all his environment, then, we see, there was nothing to assist in the -transformation of an unconscious artistic instinct, however urgent, into -a conscious artistic purpose. "Dahomey," wrote Mark Twain once, "could -not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. -Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not -itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of -stimulating exterior circumstances." He was reciting his own story in -those words. But the circumstances that surrounded Mark Twain were not -merely passively unfavorable to his own self-discovery; they were -actively, overwhelmingly unfavorable. He was in his mother's -leading-strings, and in his mother's eyes any sort of personal -self-assertion in choices, preferences, impulses was, literally, sinful. -Thus the whole weight of the Calvinistic tradition was concentrated -against him at his most vulnerable point. His mother, whom he could not -gainsay, was unconsciously but inflexibly set against his genius; and -destiny, which always fights on the side of the heaviest artillery, -delivered, in his twelfth year, a stroke that sealed her victory. - -Mark Twain's father died. Let Mr. Paine picture the scene: - -"The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with -him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, -indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred -things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the -knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother -took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. 'It -is all right, Sammy,' she said. 'What's done is done, and it does not -matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to -promise me----.' He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung -himself into her arms. 'I will promise anything,' he sobbed, 'if you -won't make me go to school! Anything!' His mother held him for a moment, -thinking, then she said: 'No, Sammy, you need not go to school any more. -Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.' So -he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like -his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and -justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious -matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held -sacred. That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to -somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping -together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous -at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, -they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid -on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A -thought struck Mrs. Clemens: 'Sam!' she said. He answered, but he was -sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet -around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in -succession after that. Then he slept more soundly." - -Who is sufficiently the master of signs and portents to read this -terrible episode aright? One thing, however, we feel with irresistible -certitude, that Mark Twain's fate was once for all decided there. That -hour by his father's corpse, that solemn oath, that walking in his -sleep--we must hazard some interpretation of it all, and I think we are -justified in hazarding as most likely that which explains the most -numerous and the most significant phenomena of his later life. - -To a hypersensitive child such as Mark Twain was at eleven that -ceremonious confrontation with his father's corpse must, in the first -place, have brought a profound nervous shock. Already, we are told, he -was "broken down" by his father's death; remorse had "laid a heavy hand -on him." But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? -"A hundred things in themselves trifling," which had offended, in -reality, not his father's heart but his father's will as a conventional -citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. -Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings out of this moody child, the -first wavering steps of the soul, that is what they have really been, -these peccadillos, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings -of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed; all those -crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, -are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of -that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, -with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meager traditions. -He is to go forth the Good Boy by _force majeure_, he is to become such -a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his -father's failure, to recover the lost gentility of a family that had -once been proud, to realize that "mirage of wealth" that had ever hung -before his father's eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly -with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to -remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and -all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any -fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away -childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always -a child, your mother's child! In a day to come you will write to one of -your friends, "We have no _real_ morals, but only artificial -ones--morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural -and healthy instincts." Never mind that now; your mother imagines her -heart is in the balance--will you break it?... Will you promise?... And -the little boy, in the terror of that presence, sobs: "Anything!" - -"There is in every man," said Sainte-Beuve, "a poet who dies young." In -truth, the poet does not die; he falls into a fitful trance. It is -perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment: he became, -and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism is the proof of it, a -dual personality. If I were sufficiently hardy, as I am not, I should -say that that little sleep-walker who appeared at Jane Clemens's bedside -on the night of her husband's funeral was the spirit of Tom Sawyer, come -to demand again the possession of his own soul, to revoke that ruthless -promise he had given. He came for several nights, and then, we are told, -the little boy slept more soundly, a sign, one might say, if one were a -fortune-teller, that he had grown accustomed to the new and difficult -rôle of being two people at once! The subject of dual personality was -always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to -his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, -susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown -from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation -of consciousness. His "wish" to be an artist, which has been so frowned -upon and has encountered such an insurmountable obstacle in the -disapproval of his mother, is now repressed, more or less definitely, -and another wish, that of winning approval, which inclines him to -conform with public opinion, has supplanted it. The individual, in -short, has given way to the type. The struggle between these two selves, -these two tendencies, these two wishes or groups of wishes, will -continue throughout Mark Twain's life, and the poet, the artist, the -individual, will make a brave effort to survive. From the death of his -father onward, however, his will is definitely enlisted on the side -opposed to his essential instinct. - -When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on his first excursion -into the great world, he gladly takes the oath, which his mother -administers, "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is -away, an oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do what -seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has -become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey -of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. -Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record -shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was -twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East -as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter journey lasted -more than a year; one might have expected it to open before him an -immense horizon; yet he seems, to judge from his published letters to -have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts or feelings of -youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of aspiration, of hope, depression, -joy, even ambition! His letters are as full of statistics as the -travel-reports of an engineer, and the only sensation he seems to -experience is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no wish -to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He is, in fact, under a -spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits himself, even from seeking on his -own account that vital experience which is the stuff of the creative -life. - -Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He hears "the old call of -the river." He becomes a pilot. - -Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon -this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the -world was to know later--"dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to -details"--should ever have persisted in acquiring the "absolutely -limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that -Mark Twain "loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and -not only the river, but a steamboat; and still more, perhaps, the -freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine omits one -important particular. We have seen that in Mark Twain two opposed groups -of wishes--the wish to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's -approval, to stand in with pioneer society--were struggling for -survival. When we turn to his account of the Mississippi pilots, their -life, their activities, their social position, we can see that in this -career both these wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in -the first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative occupation; -besides this, of all the pioneer types of the Mississippi region, the -pilot alone embodied in any large measure the characteristics of the -artist: in him alone these characteristics were permitted, in him they -were actually encouraged, to survive. - -We cannot understand why this was so without bearing in mind a -peculiarity of the pioneer régime upon which we shall have occasion more -than once to dwell. Mr. Herbert Croly has described it in "The Promise -of American Life." "In such a society," says Mr. Croly, "a man who -persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting -standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His -finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than -did the current careless and hasty product and his higher standards and -peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of -his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which -naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and -uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that -the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a -special vocation and high standards of achievement. Such a man did -insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under -the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value. -Consequently, they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with -special vocations." - -Here, of course, we have what is by far the most important fact to be -considered in any study of the creative life in the West; as we shall -see, Mark Twain remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own -view of the "special vocation" of literature. What is to be noted now is -that the pilot was an exception, and the only exception in the -Mississippi region, to this general social law. In Nevada, in -California, where Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin -his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system described by Mr. -Croly reigned in its most extreme and uncompromising form; every one had -to be a jack-of-all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The -entire welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the -Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before the war, upon -the expert skill of the pilot; for the river traffic to be secure at -all, he alone, but he at least, had to be a craftsman, a specialist of -the very highest order. There were no signal-lights along the shore, we -are told; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars; the pilot -had to know every bank and dead tree and reef, every cut-off and -current, every depth of water, by day and by night, in the whole stretch -of twelve hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he had to -"smell danger in the dark and read the surface of the water as an open -page." Upon his mastery of that "supreme science," as it was called, -hung all the civilization of the river folk, their trade, their -intercourse with the great centers, everything that stirred them out of -the inevitable stagnation of an isolated village existence. The pilot -was, consequently, in every sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a -"sovereign." Not only did he receive commands from nobody but he was -authorized to resent even the merest suggestion. "I have seen a boy of -eighteen," Mark Twain tells us, "taking a great steamer serenely into -what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing -mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere." Pilots -were, he says, "treated with marked deference by all, officers and -servants and passengers," and he adds naïvely: "I think pilots were -about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, -embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes." Above all, -and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of -experience in American society, recurs with most significant emphasis, -the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that -highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole -condition without which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. -"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the -only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the -earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people -... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... writers of all kinds are -manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but -then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and -child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day -I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." - -Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a -sort of channel for all the æsthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? -"When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent -ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a -steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were -only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and -material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: -repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for -a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can -hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, -to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating -enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean--first rate, for once! not -second, or third, or fourth--light and bright and gay, radiating a sort -of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, -its trim vigor. And what an air they had of _going_ somewhere, of -_getting_ somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit -of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! -Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of -mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And -the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any -menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and -their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the -fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great -master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that -of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural -passion of the novice lavished, for love of the _métier_, upon the only -creative--shall I say?--at least the only purposive figure in all his -experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the -Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It -was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. -"You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. -I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, -kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what -couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric -magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the -visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the -United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is -unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure æsthetic emotion, produced by a -supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship. - -Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said -in later life, when he used to assert so passionately that man is a mere -chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of -his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and -dictatorship of Circumstance.... Then Circumstance arrived with another -turning-point of my life--a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of -a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became -a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and -out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many -other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other assertion that to -be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts -had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and -respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct -to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited -an enthusiastic interest in craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a -neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;" -"he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required -intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those -printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, -therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the -training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark -Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted -to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to -submit to at any later period of his life. - -In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful -compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his -apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his -apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five -hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his -tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, -unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, -how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": -"even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," -says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament -could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is -to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a -career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, -initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum -all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, -"and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, -if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and -worship it! I want a man to--I want _you_ to--take up a line of action, -and _follow_ it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain -who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man -in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the -book, "I guess this is where our line starts"? - -Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that -shiftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for -dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of -his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, -if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, -meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of -existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing -with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to -have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I -used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things -got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can -trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and -another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, -who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing -down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. -Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the -life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to -study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. -Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books -and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots," -says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, -travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an -education as well as an entertainment to know." - -Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life" -is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was--as -it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you -were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the -world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside -from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and -straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of -some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates -what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle -or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, -application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, -determined spirit." - -It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile sentiment: it is -the emotion of a man who feels himself in the center of the road of his -own destiny. - - - - -CHAPTER III - -THE GILDED AGE - - - "The American democracy follows its ascending march, - uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as - the decrees of eternity." - - GEORGE BANCROFT. - - -You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, -feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim -labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an -artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent -nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp -schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted -with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in -fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in -fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, -for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river." - -Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him -for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as -the streets of London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia -served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will -it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great -writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound -personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the -mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread -in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind -with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits -of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, -he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has -his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circumstance -steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost. - -The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever -to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's -career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative -education, came to an abrupt end. - -Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change -instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to -him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that -exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in -the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that -he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a -military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The -whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with -which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it -does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility, -in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of -twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river -"sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and -purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that -amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and -there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on -the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had -thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and -'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark -Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the -characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile -frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over -his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was -fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a -little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become -organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would -never, in later years, have been led to assert so passionately that man -is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of -self-determination, was so new to this man who had passed his whole -adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent, -chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, -that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back -into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the -one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four -years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship: nothing -stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation. - -A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing -himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the -Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of -the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and -follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book -eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with -a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in -his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and -after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and -scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a -contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have -struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; -that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who -could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution -his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly -yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he -is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the -compulsions of his childhood. - - * * * * * - -But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall -have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about -[the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was -Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance -now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of -his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself. - -What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the -midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties -and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the -beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an -indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the -war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, -as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when -presidents were business men and generals were business men and -preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the -American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of -the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was -virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career -of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was -certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested -public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. -Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he -was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his -Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole -field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I -fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest -field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, -by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his -epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can -see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, -science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I -would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to -have accumulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was -offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into -the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to -burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the -John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than -be Historian or General or President." - -Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have -offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that -of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one -channel passed all the religious fervor of the race. - -I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, -artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works -often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a -story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called -the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love -with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to -make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes -West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and -again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had -made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the -tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would -strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it -then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to -him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was -all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he -persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or -four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I -_must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip -fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am -conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I -will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with -fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when -the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! -"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of -consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were -all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a -golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid -wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and -the Gilded Age is justified in its children. - -Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our -civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the -stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national -epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of -money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious -character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify -that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure -in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of -discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" -consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long -for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence -to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for -it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of -"another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the -mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious -zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in -the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor -of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are -repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has -become the prophet. - -We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to -Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit -of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration -of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and -Letters of John Hay": - - That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on - your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a - judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your - improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not - be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This - summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not - pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The - property you own--be it a tiny cottage or a palace--means so - much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up - whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an - attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization. - -Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances -that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are -the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not -by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in -material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up" -with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, -of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and -most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that -can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the -history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, -and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of -letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the -will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he -was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers -and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the -imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, -therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence -upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own -normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal -culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: -"Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor -and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with -occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the -bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here -one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality -of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything -was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in -his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very -disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be -acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and -notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be -tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he -not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, -and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, -debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what -is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, -for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the -other stars. - -We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we -realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War -were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought -were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, -in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity -of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the -West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success, -that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit -of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have -survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they -would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it -they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they -encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of -adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was -not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the -possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay -before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and -the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up -some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great -rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a -race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through -private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the -group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American -nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation -to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady -welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also -serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests -were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult. - -It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute homogeneity of -feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous folk before the Civil War and the -practical effect of pioneering and the business régime was to keep us -so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the -homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated -it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The -effect of business upon the individual has never been better described -than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I have known, and known -tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men--'big' financially--men -famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do -not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to -meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them -associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A -set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially -unattractive and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has -explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is -as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a -system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his -individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is -determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby -usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or -any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men -are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have -a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities -are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value -of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such -is the result of the business process, and the success of the process -required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually -automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality -significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has -drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the -collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the -collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than -the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere -assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is -called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality, -the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical, -realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly -says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the -man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact, -one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs -and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd. - -For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that -were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to -romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in -feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out -their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the -hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as -one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the -pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed? -Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform -dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an -anæsthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, -without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their -enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for -themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One -recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual -motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its -inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that -buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him -wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated -with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction -between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of -the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the -Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and -half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy -clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a -feudal castle, his wife is a châteleine, his children the baron's cubs, -and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the -broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable -blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the -promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of -his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him -the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the -material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason -and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of -reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these -illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the -story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim -Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to -whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends -used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green -plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums, -"California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one -eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had -to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting, -aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding -sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, -boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the -others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided -him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, -and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the -luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the -romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same -over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names -as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that -made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious -pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to -"boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain -parts of the West. - -Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would -not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the -country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of -criticism, in fact, was regarded as _lèse-majesté_ to the folk-spirit of -America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell -the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and -reputation. Who does not remember the story of Dickens's connection -with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil -Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less -attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an -agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and -defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded -as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no -intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong -emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad -and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was -regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was -obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of -actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, -becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant -than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge -Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' -Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll," -says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in -society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, -and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own -notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short, -entitled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary, -that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves -superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If -you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of -your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and -warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent. - -As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America -against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in -England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating -forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse -of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic -prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and -humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name -of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic -industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of -the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins -and the Morrises--in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly -untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar -destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the -state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of -1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While -the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined -place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and -fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, -and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed -that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism -they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were -the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to -victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant." - -Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, -even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the -individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the -human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil -War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or -less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the -rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, -had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were -stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a -natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, -had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories. - -In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the -gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those -days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand _young_ -men--not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, -muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and -royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and -magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious -ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans--none but -erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was -a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths -stayed at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers." -Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature -itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and -calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of -the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order -to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening -space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not -to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the -future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who -were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the -towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of -story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the -life of this New England countryside during the generation that -followed--those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants -of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population -only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What -a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!--a -civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death. -Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation -as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those -manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the -generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole -spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a -neurotic anæmia in which it has remained so largely to this day. - -This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of -its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the -unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the -fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. -Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper -in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it -was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them -high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they -were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure -shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, -just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's -unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the -winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an -extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the -less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had -gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had -not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed -them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like -Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in -Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the -stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American -past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the -conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was -not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright -light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left -behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men -westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and -the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her -complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had -become the pacemaker in the arts. - -One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new -régime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England -that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to -carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien -editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, was consecrated to the high priesthood -by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, -already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly -appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a -young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he -resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life--an -incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his -prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own -unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America -anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. -His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an -essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his -superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed -him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative -reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all -masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured -point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate -any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his -position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what -Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, -from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and -submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and -formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide -the notion of the artist's rôle through which he had found his own -salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the -religious, moral and social taboos of the time. - -I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy -actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now -that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply -played into the hands of the business régime? The taboos of the one -supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of -both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring -as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, -disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the -fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled -Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who -possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what -necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that -drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during -the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against -the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, -that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry -Adams his novel, "Democracy." - -With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these -men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, -motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding -type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong -assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon -which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of -literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist -and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who -are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and -disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American -minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of -William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad -crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate -minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of -glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing -materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see -from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, -these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by -theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers -who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age -that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop -to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form. - -Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: -no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; -there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, -for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing -eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping -with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes -that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything -essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, -admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he -mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a -belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism -of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural -possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely -upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does -not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of -life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his -eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism -of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic -dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play -in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of -decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, -of inarticulate misery--read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of -the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other -nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or -next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would -have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch -without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing -upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna -of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, -moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain -hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had -forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the -welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's -"manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of -pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the -disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a -certain beautiful residuum of truth. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -IN THE CRUCIBLE - - - "The American proposes to realize his individuality freely - and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and - free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly - consenting that some other person, better qualified or more - competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when - he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to - will." - - GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: _The People of Action_. - - -Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the -gold-fields of Nevada--the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one -that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded -Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the -woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about -a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good -time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a -child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him -out for destruction. - -Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confrères of -the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of -history, travels, literature and the sciences--a young man whom it was -an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says -Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, -indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as -one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a -certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from -the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of -barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and -dandy--in fancy percales and patent leathers--in white duck and striped -shirts--he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch -hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of -the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in -dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further -than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable -surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And -whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his -utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life -as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing -vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't -suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier -frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching -thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half -the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the -indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of -development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him -had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had -been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. -He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment. - -Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true -of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of -previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common -fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the -gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it -was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were -transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion -of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing -It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of -the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there -as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the -'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever -produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves -were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other -vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost -fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes -that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in -every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military -companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, -'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, -civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey -mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and -station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. -The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock -lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North -to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development." - -This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly -opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark -Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he -might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing -spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark -Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, -far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make -terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such -a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make -money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family--that old pledge was -fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his -failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own. -Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was -the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally -enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great -triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered -it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were -gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to -exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing -what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, -more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the -river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his -father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had -become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother -Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of -success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the -position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say, -compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not -fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for -him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine -once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make -good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also -become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his -Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look -upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or -revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man. - -What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself? -A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of -inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the -indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had -obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was -indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was -tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held -absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the -rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who -submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher -standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the -easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." -Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative -instinct, therefore--and he was anything but fully aware of them--he -could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his -craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to -acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of -sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--all -those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct--were, from -the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely -in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken -down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the -tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in -them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his -own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly -organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of -torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe, -which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering -words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks -of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was -always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous -hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it -our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He -was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality -was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a -day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were -incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who -was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated -at first, he always yielded in the end. - -Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive -instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was -stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one -could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one -afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying -'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would -come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he -would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going -after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all -their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around -to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next -forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual -facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself -strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as -twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a -foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest -a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand -in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you -that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had -to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not -merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his -level best to become a millionaire. - -It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain -failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth -a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with -exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he -failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new -work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. -Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment--these were the -qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life -had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of -his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in -spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not -fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He -went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied -me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. -"The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, -"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their -movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and -suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom -humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are -likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the -flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense -anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other -extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up -everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his -comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to -the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to -bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a -critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed -simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to -succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and -yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly -anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark -Twain's business life. - -So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious -desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of -individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in -the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted -him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the -necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American -writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain -solved by becoming a humorist. - -Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's -soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more -than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of -his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he -would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off -"alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely -from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at -all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his -surroundings"--wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would -hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything -else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to -establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the -fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." -"He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner -who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a -camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!--all the -contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's -fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to -succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in -himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives -in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted -to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any -one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up -hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary -paper in Virginia City; hell!" - -Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary -pretensions called the _Enterprise_, which was edited and written by a -group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was -to the _Enterprise_ that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and -at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he -presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with -profound reluctance. - -Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born -writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any -opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a -life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have -gravitated toward such people as the _Enterprise_ group: that he did so -is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But -committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a -different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky -journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the -pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a -good time," says Mr. Paine. "The _Enterprise_, 'Comstock to the -backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain -could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself -with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, -as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" -says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as -a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he -fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when -"the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all -hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding -himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile -walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," -says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he -came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How -different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his -piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked -forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an -inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself -and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a -capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a -hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the _Enterprise_ office worn and -travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard -leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about -one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he -added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It -was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to -claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is -something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that -suggests not an acclamation but a surrender? - -Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the -_Enterprise_ Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He -attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to -me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to -break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the -surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." -No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more -or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on -the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was -relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune -that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were -plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him -reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself -so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to -excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, -and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this -opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must -consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but -the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the -creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but -actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the -_Enterprise_ mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he -had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, -and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of -a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by -the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was -this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens -the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark -Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the _Enterprise_ -was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate -that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, -the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if -he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would -prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any -other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For -him, therefore, the opportunity of the _Enterprise_ meant an obligation -to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he -wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would -not have displayed such reluctance in joining the _Enterprise_, and the -fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a -humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling -his own soul. - -Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come -to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. -But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his -amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading -together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his -triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and -said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself--I am allowing -myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any -longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied -himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to -choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not -only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many -instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a rôle which he -apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate -all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it. - -But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. -Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer -rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the -mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new -title"--the pen-name he had adopted--"and its success." He knew that his -severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, -worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he -was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a -rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that -promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the -mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately -proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his -new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we -actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to -telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That -he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that -he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a -commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: -"His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," -says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not -with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was -necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a -good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the -_nom de plume_ was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, -crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations -in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted -a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his -merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the -time--in pioneer circles, especially, observe--simply argues that all -the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a -form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own -persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting -coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe -water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in -Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought -of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which -he was proud only because it paid. - -It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he -had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone -astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was -intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was -desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the -evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been -here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We -are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find -with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again." -Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is -certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is -crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his -journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No--not -home again--in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The -city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business -anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had -become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had -been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a -loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the -trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New -York as he is about to start on the _Quaker City_ excursion which is to -result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two -letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of -his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he -says: "I am wild with impatience to move--move--_move_!... Curse the -endless delays! They always kill me--they make me neglect every duty and -then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never -had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am -so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish -anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored -full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an -accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless -moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly -unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his -family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the -most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself -to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, -transgressed his principle of growth? - -One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in -New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it -was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in -the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. -Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while -for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a -lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought -disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus -Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it -as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he -believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written -January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what -to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up -and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save -piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be -excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single -out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and -His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to -please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed -that he had not even offered it to _The Californian_, the magazine to -which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard -it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter -prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he -has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other -hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for -it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate -him, this poor, ingenuous being!--this divided soul who has never been -able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows -no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his -own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping -Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone -rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary -edifice." - -So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted -this rôle unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic -self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying -that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative -instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive -instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that -instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by -public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine, -"was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that -never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings -of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been -to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even, -constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler -calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order -to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak -child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal -life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his -companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled -in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular. -United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make -money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it -received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected, -repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb -and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest. - -Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights -of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets. -Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes -of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to -laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered -a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the -mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his -improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect." -He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a -bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The -Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some -degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute -accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the _Quaker City_ he -found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry -Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to -follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second -book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and -intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides -this, it brought him the recognition of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It -brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the -postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a -choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be -disposed to accept--"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a -Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's -appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It -brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, -assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London--mine being -(between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was -received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the -long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least -one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on -any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in -gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when -one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite -actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred -against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." -Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which -he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset -his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in -Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go -home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic -conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient -in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had -made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had -pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in -America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored -regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely -overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most. - -It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James -Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in -their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a -humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing -that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be -something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they -found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant -something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of -culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal -visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but -to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only -ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been -a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent -barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the -presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen -applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a -dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do -it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to -his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being -gulled, and partly because he wasn't--because the beautiful force of -his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, -because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, -are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with -slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was -not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was -being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, -by the people who really _knew_, whose judgment could really be trusted. -Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply -countersigning the verdict of America. - -For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain -men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have -seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation -into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment -when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business -agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about -this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But -the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America -played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over -to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward--these -must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a -diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was -not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything -less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all -their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made. - -It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus -Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada -world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are -told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps -with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too -could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's -counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit -with possibilities of inner growth before him--what could Artemus Ward -have known about such things?--but as an embryonic institution, so to -speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself -and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he -ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was -subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," -said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement -of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and -character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with -inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had -been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we -look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les -Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for -knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can -we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not -withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, -had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not -already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America -capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said -to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least -resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your -mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend--into life -and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and -"extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never -forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he -acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and -refined party" of the _Quaker City_ excursion which led him to the feet -of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward -Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread -and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," -said he--Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now -here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to -deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than -enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do -it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him -how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his -percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in -the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were -the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men -of statecraft, literature and divinity. - -Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance -of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner -peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him -committed to the pursuit of worldly success. - -That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a -creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. -He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral -infantility. We know that the rôle of laugh-maker had, from early -adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in -Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers -laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud -and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, -where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his -audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, -he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in -public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had -returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held -so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That -persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to -a _métier_ in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of -craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It -was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least -resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was -falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied -that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the -artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a -journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance. - -Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he -wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have -doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, -except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." -To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success -of his book--a success the like of which had scarcely been known in -America--Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a -journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and -editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the -rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer -with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that -Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's -fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest -point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had -temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now -again literature had dropped into the background, had become an -avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial -interests!--there were whole years during which he thought of hardly -anything else. - -This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, -with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic -attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to -"follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a -series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage -of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the -same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of -adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was -this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered -by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the -success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other -autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige -machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning -to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary -life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the -boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a -peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other -phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various rôles he has -played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or -education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I -ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that -under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the -reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really -experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all -different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the -artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an -infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he -tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and -again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There -was nothing new in that story"--"The American Claimant"--"but the -finger-prints in this one is virgin ground--absolutely _fresh_, and -mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied -a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded -to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public -wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with -what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"--the -possibilities of this, the possibilities of that--in the commercial, not -in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the -promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with -its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, -in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series -that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not -as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally -conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his -life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot -and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant -of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naïvely, -"but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a -thing as an artist had never existed. - -Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark -Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his -agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, -Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain -hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is -reputation anyway--money is secondary." So he floods the house with -complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he -says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune -didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and -your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the -country." It was true. But in that moment--that typical moment, in that -reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's -die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with -generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to -walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes -to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a -formidable spirit, that _alter ego_ within him,--he is going to hear its -bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: -his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the -dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned -over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished -to secure a government appointment for Orion." - -Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable -sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says--with an emphasis of his -own--he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. -From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called -adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence -without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" -now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments." - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - - - "Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as - bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride." - - IBSEN: _The Comedy of Love_. - - -The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, -consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead -himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and -still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most -consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own -way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy -calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what -Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, -of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so -little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in -America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: -"in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious -things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to -practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon -one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the -bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. -No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of -industry. - -Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he -put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light -are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if -Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the -children of light he would have been perfectly free--to starve and to -shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its -moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he -could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the -recognized American game according to the recognized American rules. - -Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct -of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just -because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks -of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that -people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling -them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the -lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a -personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his -environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear -for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the -most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without -foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. -Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he -wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, -to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left -vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished -him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he -met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make -good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew -the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in -prestige, stood to him _in loco parentis_; and, to complete the ironic -circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a -Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them -he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. -Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody." - -The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later -years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we -are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser -Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit -heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions -that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the -will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus -Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what -they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret -Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently -until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to -a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in -the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above -all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first -moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary -affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature -and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean -Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The -Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the -woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom -with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual -rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by -his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the -self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go -his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always -been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve -it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S. -McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself. - -In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to -the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the -prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a -contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the -community to which money is the primary condition and the primary -instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew -Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged -to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the -spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an -expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a -young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued -now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And -meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social -inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish -manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness--everything that made -foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that -would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to -consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of -a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of -bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had -ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had -become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of -humor was a gold-mine--so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently -cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He -was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he -wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot -properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we -realize that he had been manoeuvered into the rôle of a candidate for -gentility. - -But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had -been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his -creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead -father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his -mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man, -in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take -precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been -the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the -days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he -was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go -back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure -as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained -precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time, -we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever--proud (even if somewhat, -critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had -been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, -scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In -turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the -same Sam, and always would be--a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true -that Mark Twain, _who_ required authority as much as he required -affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who -would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be -mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at -least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and -afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the _Quaker -City_ party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and -character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed -my buttons on," he wrote--he was thirty-two at the time--"kept my -clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), -lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only -natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife -"implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his -subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, -"she edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my -works--she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the -totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia -Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death -Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her. -Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about -him?--"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was, -I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken -the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place. -Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara -Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the -billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."--a sign that was -always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been -called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used -to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him -straight--"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he -went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have -been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue -of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male. - -As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest -that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been -affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other -reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to -adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest -instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of -success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with -the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on -terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old -renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make -good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated -obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just -as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or -finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little -less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying -that, automatically, her gods had become his. - -It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations -between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere -of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even -of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is -regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English -criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, -Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family -and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village -ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At -bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic -analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is -of profound importance to society and because they know that what any -man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and -affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind -that all the best biographies even of our American worthies--Hamilton, -Franklin and Lincoln, for instance--have been written by Englishmen! No -one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society -has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, -therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited -his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, -whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his rôle as a realist and -carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her -heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest -has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and -that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations -and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist -and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of -European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New -Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as -creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. -Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, -she stepped immediately into a rôle far more truly influential than that -of any President. - -Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and -mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in -any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization -all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual -culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted -down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had -attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social -stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, -fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter -generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular -sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, -imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to -submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august -brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains -on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with -their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The -quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect -based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of -the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice -proclaimed them sacrosanct. - -We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a -presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place--a place -of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, -pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the -daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not -to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame -did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted -almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that -Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of -Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he -had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had -been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect -for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt -himself, the interloper then--he would not have been Carlyle but the -stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark -Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl -without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned -anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been -conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her -friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore--and love -compelled him to do that--he had to win the approval and the pride of -Elmira itself, he had to win the _imprimatur_ of all that vast and -intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the -symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," -that "no one was good enough for her--certainly not this adventurous -soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark -Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy -upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in -order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in -California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his -character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the -"worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover -on his mettle? - -Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this -new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able -to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his -candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the -vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and -lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know, -"he had become suddenly a person of substance--an associate of men of -consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He -was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to -that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to -refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But -could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we -are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his -financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book," -he wrote, "unless there was _money_ in it, and a good deal of it"; he -had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and -"conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were -almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent -and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his -marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already--the best possible -omen for one with his resources--$22,000 in debt! He had put his -shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even -faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so -manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being -equal--and his wife would see to that--he really was a safe, -conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon -capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain, -anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to -cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been -accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course -they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and -besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start -them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in -"The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal -that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, -whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all -significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author -adds, naïvely, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated -as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon -in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally -stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that -this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his -gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot -forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable -street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage -and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous _ménage_. -It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's -wedding day!--he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the -confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely -committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the -outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly -shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had -foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, -"lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper -enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the -ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the -ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged -it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound -himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that -Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo _Express._ -Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business -man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one. - -The full consequences of this moral surrender--shall we call it?--can -only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, -precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently -and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he -might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in -his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many -other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven -back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect _horror_ and -heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the -bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I -cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I -suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you -would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have -wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems -to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who -was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His -bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. -"Farewell--a long farewell--to business!" he exclaimed during those -weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will _never_ touch -it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I -will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as -follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good -and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer -up--don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has -been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. _Except_ when I think of -you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving -and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem -to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the -dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but -no dishonor--and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, -Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she -doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't -convince _me_!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary -of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before -all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, -who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her -husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind -in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. -She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and -all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in -the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to -retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very -ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he -was involved more and more deeply in it. - -As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation -as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should -adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that -he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the -matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had -promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was -laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed -his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical -type--at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete -invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to -sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her -back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, -to arise and walk--Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, -and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. -"I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark -Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first -child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal -absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his -wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I -am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am -done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith -to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What -chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the -pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find -his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never -possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new -life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are -valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are -admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that -private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime -interests of man. - -"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is -said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and -the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all -matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. -"Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of -supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for -the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a -little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely -going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had -been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; -but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and -purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his -personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she -set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in -each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward -the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, -indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; -she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of -religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his -religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens -had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... -It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family -prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a -Bible chapter." Thus was reëstablished over him that old Calvinistic -spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a -child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what -fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious -man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, -for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," -says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly -with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with -the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the -proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had -long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she -prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness -to which he, the chivalrous Southerner--the born cavalier, in -reality--could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him -"Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in -keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could -never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only -accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he -gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her -"exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own -judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as -another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would -quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral." - -It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the -blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in -turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive -about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me -do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was -partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, -but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between -the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial -body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in -their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was -also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried -to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having -annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in -order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose -approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of -embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table -that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, -"and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was -almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the -guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells -after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells -bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than -we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last -moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send -her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more -for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for -mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, -after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had -privately suggested to you that we hadn't any _frames,_ and that if you -wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was -simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How _could_ -you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive -nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have -been intolerable to her that, at the _Atlantic_ dinners, her husband, in -spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood -was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as -Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, -unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all -hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his -Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace -does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my -list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I -was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my -repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as -an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not -been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it -tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, -as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods. - -Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character -can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his -marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter -of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of -letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept -him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial -assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo _Express_; in return, -he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his -Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be -immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate -editorship of the Buffalo _Express_ without a single word of comfort or -encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to -be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word -shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom -is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more -innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage -had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of -chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already -induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting -"parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal, -the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could -manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief -censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed -him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture, -meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please -Boston--impossible, terrifying task!--had become as obligatory upon Mark -Twain as to please Elmira. - -We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the -Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider -the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared -to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of -his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston -audience--4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and -he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in -a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a -charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells -was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the -nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the -latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her -husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled -them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter -of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a -court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him--to his -own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to -your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who -takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and -of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject -when Livy took charge of me ... and I may _still_ be to the rest of the -world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no -doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been -enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as -an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own -self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in -behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no -comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were -themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges -of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's -neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It -seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an -old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great -embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder -that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do -about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats -and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In -this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility--provincial because it -was without a sense of proportion--were kept constantly before his mind -and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the -Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad -threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple -Delilah his wife. - -For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a -taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The -criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens -and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they -formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to -read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of -life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could -not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion -of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud, -under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible -and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive -ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, -was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold -novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language -for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at -work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so -greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather -discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all. -"Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs. -Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable -damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other -way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind -fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And -shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by -the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy -says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're -going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly -gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits -and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody -might have written but whose romantic mediævalism was equally -respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs. -Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have -been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." -Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural -genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such -subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if -we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in -these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of -"blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark -Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only -tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly -pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds: -"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He -persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet -acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to -friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so -little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this -mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, -precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to -live down. - -Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the rôle of critic and censor. A -memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over -the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her -task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them: - - Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word - would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty - often. - - But can't I get it in _any_where? You've knocked it out - every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, - good word. - - Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing - a slave boy. - - It's out, and my father is whitewashed. - - Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change - "breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. - I would take that and "offal" out of the language. - - You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. - - - -We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive -as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility -and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, -no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no -artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for -bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his -latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as -something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of -conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, -specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; -and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to -further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially -as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, -as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash -not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. -Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't -afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his -letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the -"swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the -thing Huck would say"--namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark -Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a -certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of -Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it -into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his -conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the -German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. -Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. -Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute -she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her -tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to -miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. -Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my -scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little -one-sided?" - -They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers -behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for -an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. -"Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party--in -Rome--he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one -wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. -Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, -you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, -regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've -been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these -tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an -ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. -Very humiliating, and also very tragic! - -Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western -life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to -win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, -seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant -word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of -liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess -that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" -was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that -grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to -formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, -free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, -he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins -themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And -in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all -the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, -instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the -genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature -and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to -seek. - -Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain -Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty -years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough -in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it -assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he -wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his -little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up -and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one -more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do -anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, -and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one -locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in -1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular -success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he -had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from -pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire--we know it as -much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his -own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious -to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of -corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was -here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid -before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: -'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere -magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself--publish it -first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some -of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There -was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of -the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark -Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe -in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! -The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was -to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great -leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child -who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to -smoke the pipe of truth. - -Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it -shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe -and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man--is it -remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, -happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, -the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game -as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns -an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life -is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, -as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five -on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week -day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss -wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, -on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a -will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from -responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of -creating standards of his own and living up to them? - -"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," -wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which -influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets -him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find -himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose -approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's -command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a -deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views -which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and -blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in -public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like -the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his -environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color--had -he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul? - -"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his -life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had -never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor -express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more -idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any -possibility have occurred to him to _resolve_ to become brave. He _could -not originate the idea_--it had to come to him from the _outside_." - -The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of -Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic -plea in self-extenuation? - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - - - "Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole - capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he - cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping - friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what - one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. - This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ." - - IBSEN: _Letter to Brandes_,1870. - - -And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that -all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, -uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and -passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who -used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. -Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher -of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark -Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and -unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he -has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every -great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous -relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined -to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian -interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the -labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his -individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to -type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer -environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering -in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, -from the outset of his life, subjected itself! - -Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy -as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," -he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition -was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and -uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas -and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an -expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; -trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark -Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a -person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven -to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they -did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, -to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the -husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the -purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and -entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of -his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this -narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so -powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that -instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood. - -We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's -universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he -seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his -fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his -nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. -"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a -heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes -and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and -lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came -home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its -eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from -this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed -neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the -worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one -great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's -home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his -domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any -monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; -it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And -having accepted the rôle of the opulent householder, he threw into it as -much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work. - -Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going -to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses -were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up -to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," -"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, -according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to -increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at -hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for -explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those -who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand -that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, -mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something -almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent -considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of -living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for -some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, -not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel -Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the -visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently -extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was -living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses -amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In -the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could -furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and -highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural -taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, -would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those -early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his -"disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that -finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large -hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, -"he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and -delight of his guests. There were _always_ guests; they were coming and -going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a -'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of -his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay -the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he -virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer -months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his -mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these -things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that -they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed -for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit -cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more -ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the -child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she -found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy! - -To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the -public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the -beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large -consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of -adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up -in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of -the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have -remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and -become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing -need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a -professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a -waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt -requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of -casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a -postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use--not to mention -the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were -his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. -He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of -other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding -he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first -author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work--his -impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in -this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"--that he -had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had -been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can -add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and -one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see -one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact -that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to -which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to -the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the -following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of -marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a -spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises -amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is -not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two -hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained -of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had -to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no -choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he -had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of -his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one -month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to -redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for -a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries -of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred -million dollars. - -Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced -in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to -heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? -Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the -distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy -with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to -follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book -because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"--for this he -had, in fact, become--he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might -say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular -enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the -same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the -proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns -to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he -who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten -days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative -principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at -least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, -gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make -millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of -authors--he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the -country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, -"reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone -of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions -a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing -themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them -three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if -his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift -and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he -is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, -impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against -the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it -with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he -has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, -"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means -of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He -"liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was -pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger -to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of -his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of -the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him--"here I -am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt -gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that? - -For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had -adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, -position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation -of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe. - -He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more -oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the -trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What -were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of -Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General -Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the -"Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. -It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it -was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for -getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were -secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost -consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish -weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own -shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what -he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly -confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for -a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, -penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain, -untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, -immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most -interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is -quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of -Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing -figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration -of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because -of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his -faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he -admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, -is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race -prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of -imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American -business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever -held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was -Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut -Yankee," had set out to make mediæval England a "going concern" could -hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that -phenomenon in all history. - -Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view -of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European -letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the -appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are -told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his -family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a -distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of -the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be -ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated -by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a -feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity -student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he -told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the -deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to -us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew -him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and -circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find -him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely -imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was -carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters -to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged -in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything -on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the -cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it -was in his power and his fame. - -Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in -the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set -against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, -Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the -headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and -infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has -seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with -complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept -as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding -materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing -so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In -1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a -Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of -improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested -that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he -was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the -great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the -framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far -Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the -colors of the privileged class which the new industrial régime had -brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a -member. - -His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his -essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in -the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to -his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence -and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends -the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for -the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets -the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy -which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more -nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the -tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, -against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I -finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every -time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay -the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not -a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy -of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish -to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, -"Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a -scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a -Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous -defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, -tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he -was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one -situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for -trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he -would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, -frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which -he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent -to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages -in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on -the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on -the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London -drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the -Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the -insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of -sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral -splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men -benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly -opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this -was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time -he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have -afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his -letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry -views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily -written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to -dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud -voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of -his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing -attendance on him!--how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not -hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly -have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the -principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic -victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one -situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate -the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; -and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his -dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an -article passionately advocating that the salaries of American -ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be -devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true -function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing -it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial -society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement. - -As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take -precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with -him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the -pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the -feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on -England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the -scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend -those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson -having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English -Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to -the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, -how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic -bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was -regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. -As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to -include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less -and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself -against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious -tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with -very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive -economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in -his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply -he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, -then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in -his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more -than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had -once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy -Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to -say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I -never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore -when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to -the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant -self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel -of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the -Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for -in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is -lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a -Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book -or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find -him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other -Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into -his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint -Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut -Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch -whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to -accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was -Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself -over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he -who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in -a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy -Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there -recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his -Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of -Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated. - -So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed -reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty -liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the -American nation in the hollow of his hand--the nation, or rather the -epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or -trump--but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home -with his public--he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to -pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he -does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored -family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from -every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark -Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause -would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that -matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole -neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a -unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, -had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor. - -Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character -he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an -uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an -expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his -surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naïve worship -of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical -inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of -subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this -let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I -have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, -spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at -all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And -once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular rôle and had -forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the -pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards -of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he -had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a -reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years -and an ass for fifty-five." - -It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's -instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of -literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was -merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any -other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination -for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other -business man--to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make -money because other people made money and to make more money than other -people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother -Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the -span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I -have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford -it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." -Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was -sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to -realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and -in the other that he had not lived it--for certainly his marriage had -not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public! -Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so -supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no -conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, -he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business -enterprise and of letters. - -"If Sam had got that pocket"--we remember the saying of his old -California comrade--"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of -his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent -of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he -have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes -happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and -perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its _débâcle_, Mark -Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to -stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, -"have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had -been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own -books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were -promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to -write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work -altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so -neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes -of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as -well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of -the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing -business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We -have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have -been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": -of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my -retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain -pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we -can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this -ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical -aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning -Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is -simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade -and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, -found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the -material rewards it brought him. - -How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point -of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those -middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised -men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to -the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the -hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. -Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the -literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's -cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how -Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a -personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the -word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as -against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic -of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the -Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain -disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the -Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to -mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her -husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as -nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the -illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was -identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his -brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting -Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion--At 12:20 this afternoon a -line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the -first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was -done _automatically_--instantly--perfectly. This is indeed the first -line of movable types that ever _was_ perfectly spaced and perfectly -justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the -immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. -Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well--dizzy, -stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human -brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful -mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how -wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered -the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was -fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, -too far away--as even his financial interest was too shallow, after -all--to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable -mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, -of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark -Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a -piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of -the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of -the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations -in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he -called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations -are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets -who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's -seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such -people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had -witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and -innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age -for having produced Walt Whitman. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - - - "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test - of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" - - JOHN STUART MILL. - - -We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in -Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America -indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we -recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to -the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every -influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of -opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the -real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling -Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which -had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real -Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained -rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a -child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this -childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual -independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work -as a writer. - -"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous -temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one -written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland -where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three -at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing -that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him -to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. -To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as -we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the -torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got -back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he -could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and -when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he -would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been -so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what -he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I -was the kind of person that _does_ things. Does them and reflects -afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without -asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that -time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been -punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and -reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I -still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and -reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition -of immaturity. - -Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for -gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the -fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed -dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes -of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had -the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were -staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go -down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an -elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at -the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the -dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to -this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he -added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went -back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came -down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a -really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. -To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like -descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place -where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous -at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully -protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk -waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was -seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along -the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the -dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for -his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do -the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. -When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at -Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford -pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was -"planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient -Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would -have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or -rather still, Tom Sawyer? - -Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense -of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of -his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not -Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell -that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a -literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not -affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so -increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our -political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where -that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to -have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and -economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his -traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social -tendencies that had so spectacular a _dénouement_ within four years of -his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the -century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's -funeral--"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, -"will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from -now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the -Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was -involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might -almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is -scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy -of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of -it--indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity -regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same -rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think -of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a -succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives -wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that -the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of -Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the -world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification -whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was -"entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political -history." - -And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark -Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. -Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of -sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, -political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would -expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for -example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It -requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious -little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the -communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade -every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the -sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? -Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most -conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly -unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all. - -And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped æsthetic -sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the -common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of -an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch -below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the -majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous -acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world -remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in -heaven":--"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to -have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in -matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is -mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going -to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did -he like? In painting, Landseer--"and the way he makes animals absolute -flesh and blood--insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little -and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could -tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the -beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and -that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than -any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs -America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, -Kipling--"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are -told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a -sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained -his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that -Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the -fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar -Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of -doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbô," -which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was -wholly non-æsthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could -stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. -He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's -"Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have -taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of -all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight -in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and -Thanatopsianism--in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the -most primitive form of æsthetic emotion, combined with just those tints -of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are -characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence. - -Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the -mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his -lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic -self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose -extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes -gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of -letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, -the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of -greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his -own juvenility freely registered itself. - -"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very -remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, -"but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have -developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... -he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even." - -I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the -fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has -been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; -she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been -the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, -childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm -perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of -that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was -in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in -upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of -happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual -and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, -Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children -themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house -always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider -scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish -hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by -trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an -energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have -guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells -reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; -admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, -there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story -of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that -story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown -men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy -was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds -the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps -that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it. - -Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there -ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His -mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and -without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off -as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which -would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from -his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable -were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable -to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was -super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was -doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe. - -Unused, half-used, misused--was ever anything like that energy? Mr. -Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because -his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of -darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing -himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, -because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to -the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant -trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of -gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, -unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to -turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the -final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest -as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead -lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, -thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. -Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been -published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't -have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's -letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His -mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance -that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature -tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's -way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the -fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded -manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts -about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the -interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer -Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in -1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly -tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family -censor--"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a -dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn -Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which -Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death--how many others -were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, -loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in -his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions--how -like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of -authority!--was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast -flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk--was it garrulous, was it not -rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an -undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, -following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, -outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind? - -An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty--could there be a -surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all -this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon -who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two -supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his -writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has -monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art. - -Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits -of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is--where -shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can -write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; -"but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I -didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't -play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that -years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a -play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine -articles and books--and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this -a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a -talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of -letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from -attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but -the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and -well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had -interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those -months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He -appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he -found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of -beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true -even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he -was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the -Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd -contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the -publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know -how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." -This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the -composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, -impossible performance"--no doubt because he had been able to write the -whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only -by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He -wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing -and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing -it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but -incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was -probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more -ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession -of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was -he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in -defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was -the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold. - -In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we -observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden -desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot -master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to -interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of -sustained interest in his work--his lack of interest in literature -itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of -his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the -technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, -surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his -æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by -æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems -to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in -literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. -Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had -never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother -had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, -he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of -Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, -in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane -Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper--is not -that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here -again there was a positive note--his lifelong preoccupation with -grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas -by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly -verbal!--"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful -German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's -Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," -"General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation -in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells -that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for -saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some -imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling -women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward -the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be -infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are -all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his -first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I -suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in -the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with -letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of -"Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring -from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing -off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to -take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially -never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well? - -Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man -is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his -taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some -slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" -having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years -after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright -copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, -although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to -understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, -obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human -spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The -Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark -Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the -expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through -the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican--all the galleries.... We -examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, -Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we -didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar -stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We -fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor -and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its -pet feature--there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and -Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a -hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, -more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known -was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the -American people of his time were simply the English middle class -transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to -Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to -have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife -and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had -subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his -mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an -old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream -of the "land of Egypt"--Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at -all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European -tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. -His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of -the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry -and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of -Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with -these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which -had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all -the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage. - -How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine -speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to -construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate -personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief -gifts--transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater -at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are -indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation -in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process -of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of -them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in -design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or -historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," -"Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom -Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he -said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he -assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon -his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose -in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the -Mississippi"--and even there it is the river itself and not its human -nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in -Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of -American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never -become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over -that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed -to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his -characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has -sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only -characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded -Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, -he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and -what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: -unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he -says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined -sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the -book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not -attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail -how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in -passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is -perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been -transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. -He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in -consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even -to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of -his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos -of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: -consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear -of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his -imagination. - -We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit -with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the -artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of -influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas -are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's -imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except -for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his -own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own -spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without -development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins--a -fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": -"Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost -entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private -venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not -to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. -When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded -by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal -experience. - -Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage -that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson -Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he -had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had -come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It -was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should -write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he -set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and -stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": -we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down -the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, -because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in -nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never -used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems -hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to -write for the _Atlantic_ and it is only then that fresh memories rise in -his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand -for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to -Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A -Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful -for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even -"Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not -spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the -story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in -him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in -another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells -to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written -for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and -slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to _The Atlantic_," says Mr. -Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and -before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to -work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of -it are condemned here and there and yonder." - -Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious -"laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary -sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at -the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on -authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that -to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but -what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose -luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, -especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in -bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy -comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that -indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to -spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no -doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his -matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether -useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too -seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent -assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, -and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign -that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of -those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with -all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a -boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a -journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the -goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low -that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged -him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the -capitalist régime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of -reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system -in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare -himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was -predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 -of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very -last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide -repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: -'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one -imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But -who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from -a lazy line? - -It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can -explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was -subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take -notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make -speeches." That innocent _réclame_ of his, that irresistible passion for -the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to -have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his -inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart -had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For -court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living -that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done -worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four -months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on -the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one -of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was -dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into -which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed -into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been -able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that -rôle the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" -he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to -be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." -And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that -he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing -quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the -truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent -youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them -into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of -being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of -his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who -certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a -passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the -last man gave out from sheer exhaustion." - -For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his -work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an -increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly -have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We -remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the _Quaker -City_ excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically -meaningless to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless that it -seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in -my mind as a pleasant memory.... An accusing conscience gives me peace -only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it -but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by -the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to -penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the -change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the -Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from -"art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and -duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the -first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier, -"before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river -itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his -task explaining, in that connection, the difference between -"theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just -so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more -so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the -'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has -become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that -descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an -absolutely certain financial success--how repellant it became to him as -time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the -self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell -that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't -have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, -and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and -propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down -went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he -had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief? -"The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to -finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A -Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it. -He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted -child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a -charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the -moment in the approval of his wife. - -We have seen--and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his -arrested development--that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for -literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What -is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in -his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think--over-expressed -it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so--in something he wrote once -of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as -we say, more than for aught else whatever--cared for them with that kind -of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond -votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a -refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect -freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark -Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My -right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write -this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it--no, I mean 1,000,000--next -fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't -have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have -been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost -cynical indifference, of insolence even. - -Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a -significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the -creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, -"his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on -his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far -behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and -it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his -best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his -judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and -certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can -take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything -but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with -such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object -in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had -approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the -craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how -exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!--"possibly the book may -not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." But more -striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven -times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of -preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation -and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously -exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in -that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully. -What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for -"Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he -had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own -fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular -pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them -anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from -the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious -ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of -indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey -of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve -years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his -delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine, -the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying--that spirit which -came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly -gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which -tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the -dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a _réchauffé_ for children, -for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no -doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely -treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the -book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never -known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains -in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship. - -If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine -the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same -time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive -stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession, -have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think -of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was, -says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw.... -On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably -would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence -due?--"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all -but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with -all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent, -prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in -one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get -a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his -"laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform, -and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought -always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice -of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have -said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in -fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his -essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the -_raconteur_ of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is -just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of -mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of -the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a -boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land -because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him -reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had -remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To -tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper -places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at -last--oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control, -to spring that final effect of horror!--there was something worthy of a -man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in -his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable -through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and -training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age -of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, -to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had -Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential -authority, with that old negro _raconteur_, that old pilot of the -Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark -Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his -best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, -the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as -often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had -expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at -least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at -least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: -in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring -masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and -thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass -muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the -others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, -inherited folk-skill--he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist -ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his -_métier_, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever -more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going -his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. -Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual -consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had -remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural -genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with -which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he -found open before him. - -It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life -should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it -now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and -why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The -autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on -hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because -they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore, -that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it -is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either -internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until -it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open -and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary -number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the -surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which -is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the -American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial -success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse, -characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find -him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an -absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885, -at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained -his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you -can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had -"assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he -had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was -the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually -recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote _con -amore_ were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not -only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something -in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he -was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men--that was the -public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business -men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the -phrase, "children of a larger growth"? - -Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he -seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" -could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly -"Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. -But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom -Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he -associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a -publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" -and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic -consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its -real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, -all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious -Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, -though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. -Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is -clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys -through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its -bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de -Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with -love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this -happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says -that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best -book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown -in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to -a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it -on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One -might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a -hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays -which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of -the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift -stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering -itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books -alone--these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering -on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the -ground. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - - - "Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters." - - ALEXANDER HARVEY. - - - -At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going -through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of -men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a -certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you -would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, -however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is -only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the -guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack -and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact -this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the -imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the -trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another -self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you -perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has -become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in -the twinkling of an eye. - -So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no _real_ morals," he wrote in one -of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and -preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." -Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality -of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but -upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial -morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, -as we have seen, had conformed to a moral régime in which the -profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been -submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the -respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to -depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the -explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self -had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had -concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct -of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that -instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and -manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never -having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to -air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were -black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning -Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant -blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on -it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the -conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it. - -First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he -was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social -régime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious -self urged him to maintain these values and this régime. His unconscious -self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him -in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his -story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the -famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, -he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse -races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with -his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi -diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his -best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two -incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the -symbol of Mark Twain himself. - -Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged -on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was -always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the -floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by -apprehensions--badgered, harassed"--and let us add Mr. Paine's -adjectives--"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset," -till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent -the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he -always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his -will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant, -fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental -desire pointed him just the other way? - -Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had -submerged himself in the rôle of the husband, the father, the neighbor, -the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His -absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development -of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain -was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house -was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own -drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent -caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the -householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one -observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting -against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being -"bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and -tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and -wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." -Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or -getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results -too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain -became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only -just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, -he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so -extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which -developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one -of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and -the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with -her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have -been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not -qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone -who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose -myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which -the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other -caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old -Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic -protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. -Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's -constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found -in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely -inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. -We can see from this that although his conscious life had been -overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, -his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature. - -And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of -Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that -"heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations -like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists -mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate, -that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of -Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness -and priggishness of his own _entourage_? I should go even further, I -should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark -Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had -regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially; -Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for -gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written -to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted -classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of -the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be -as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the -encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; -but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of -fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language. -But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's -literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he -"detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written -by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored -them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have -despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste -was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a -par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his -wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had -accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his -unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to -please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything -about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's -criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude -of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious -self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how -strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself -directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its -teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated -bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic -aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the -repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend -Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, -and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a -companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he -roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried -self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a -prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model. - -We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious -observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when -the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked -on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies -behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were -together on a lecture tour?--"You will never, never know, never divine, -guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made -until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has -taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and -troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke -of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." -His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for -Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," -he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them--they have found a -hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in -fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. -White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar -books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors--after -Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot--were Pepys, Suetonius and -Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, -and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the -cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such -passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely -"spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is -Man?"--"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. -For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I -ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other -difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when -at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: -"Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as -unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, -kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (_and -could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not -I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no -other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which -his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for -Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually -praising their "unrestrained frankness." - -And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of -parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark -Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he -wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. -Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over -Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he -would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold -fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism -was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been -permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to -ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. -Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the -time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the -English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and -assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could -not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the -riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he -poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of -a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at -a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity -among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, -has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard -one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that -are current in every New York publishing house? - -In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful -ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through -the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the -unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait -for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the -_outré_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia -Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark -Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon -upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and -they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and -thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it -from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily -search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and -oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in -order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they -were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort -of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the -texture of Mark Twain's writings. - -For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through -with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In -the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. -In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been -prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or -by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship -which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some -contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, -are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In -such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully -satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a -compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two -railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms -of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud -has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any -reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we -are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious -bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those -embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that -express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies -wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon -which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or -rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this -process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, -certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am -writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some -manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On -these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be -straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." -When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead -Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was -frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote -his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about -himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia -of his soul. - -Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, -for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the -first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is -proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the -book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American -Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he -wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. -Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly -expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to -be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that -never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion -mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself -once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in -short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed -were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that -sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such -times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all -sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits -of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible -animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort -on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a -propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved -abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to -literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in -the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally -been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian -monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant -farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce -to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing -circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but -two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed -the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. -That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed -further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it -stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of -passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry -satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, -that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far -relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the -battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our -very eyes. - -Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of -"wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is -surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the -celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward -J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the -Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they -made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the -celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this -Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him. - -Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate -of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is -the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by -the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note -the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the -unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is -a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu -of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. - -This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead -Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with -Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an -author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that -Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he -continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply -another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the -same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been -privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar, -with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; -appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and -fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful -of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But -irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for -it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided -without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson -was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt -for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him -before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a -genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed -here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets -generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his -scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't -it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired -Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it -possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was -picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? -Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures -Pudd'nhead out-manoeuvring the village folk and triumphing over them -in the end. - -Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame -and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more -or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says -Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally -and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were -never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. -For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of -self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and -that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one -but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole -community--of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by -leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield -and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted -incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens," -the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all -those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his -true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and -admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it--it was -these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon -him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who -took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their -hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a -deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in -the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the -misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, -the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to -recognize its divinity? - -Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the -"wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the -desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself -in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the -suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells -about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body -"a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, -far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no -chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale -of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of -a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old -castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into -subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation -for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that. -As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American -Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age," -who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after -one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his -own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful -claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those -fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure -projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business -life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet -forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true -rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark -Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to -account for his constant preoccupation with this idea. - -Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his -old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that -flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and -fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have -been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in -himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese -Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the -usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle -perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and -"The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that constitutes "The Prince -and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the rôle of the -beggar-boy--Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn -himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the -Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically -slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of -incompatibles bound together in one flesh--the Extraordinary Twins, the -"good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad" -boy of whom society disapproves--how many of Mark Twain's stories and -anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!--does he -not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history -of his life? - -We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was -expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become -owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the -poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American -progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," -the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the -discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more -wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been -discussing, however, we can see that while the censorship had been -sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his -unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to -cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his -saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like -Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant," -thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where -"prosperity and position constitute rank." Here, as in the malevolent, -Mephistophelian "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we -perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save -his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained -fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his -finger-print invention--otherwise he would find something better to do -than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how -could you expect a young English snob to know anything about democracy? -That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his -readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would -know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the -great American game of bluff they would have to forgive _him_! As long -as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short, -he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the -public in the hollow of his hand, knew it. - -It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand -the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn." -Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little -boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let -himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the -writing and the fate of this book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to -have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the -publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain! -Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pass the -censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an -irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this -world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization. -That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity -we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting -to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons -attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to -find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he -can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive! -Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness -are so many shields behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of -the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his -unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical -passages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the -mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by -the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has -the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: -"There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The -withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the -sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in -his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism -in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have -appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the -lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial -detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation. -"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," -says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable -on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!--that raft and that -river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole -unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds -and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of -the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"? -Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was -not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright, -shining arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is -because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that -gave it its momentum. - -Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was -intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the rôle of a demiurge, in -fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and -misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for -this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed! -Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs, -petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the -domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those -second parents who had taken the place of his first--we have to thank -it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and -general revolt of Huckleberry Finn: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; - she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - - "Well, everybody does that way, Huck." - - "Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I - can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub - comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that - way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in - a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. - Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got - to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to - git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder - wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she - wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before - folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now - these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I - ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...." - -This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see -what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - - - "To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is - nobler and less trouble." - - _Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._ - - -And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant -Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he -was in revolt against a rôle which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust -upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc" -anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark -Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous -writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other -than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, -we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic -development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this -career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that -found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his -decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious -and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige -had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark -Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and -what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and -at the same time achieved such ample material rewards. - -It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we -have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; -and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency -who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a -humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he -was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of -Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. -Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, -sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of -chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous -cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society -required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems -to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a -distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition--the -battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it -seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, -when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is -the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind -it." - -Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark -Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that -in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found -that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his -diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do _hate_ to go -back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from -mining. "We fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada -as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman -say, the other day, that it was the 'd----dest country under the -sun'--and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never -rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green -thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the -purest--most unadulterated and uncompromising--_sand_." And as with the -setting--so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, -"the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on -him": more than once he found it necessary--this young man of -twenty-eight--"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat -Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs -and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." -That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own -testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d----n San Francisco style -of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made -his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands--"God, what a contrast with -California and the Washoe"!--ever sweet and blessed in his memory. -Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was -this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also -call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which -also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of -his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he -was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was -always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill -his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr. -Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic -waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of -the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam -swear."--Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was -living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation. - -Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of -pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life. -It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with -domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that -sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as -we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was, -nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or -satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were -civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom -civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable -avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which -their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, -they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were -blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, -that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children -were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how -hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining -population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex -tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single -monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which -kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse -in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually -impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept -a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to -conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask -of a rough good-fellowship that found expression mainly in the nervously -and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the -gambling-hell. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which -peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, -quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the very pick and choice of -the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing -It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or -decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed -hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon -the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof -of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed. - -Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that -life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the -fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The -gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an -outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of -masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the -intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the -human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering -one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps -the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was -almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the -day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so -common--that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the -newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his -old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated -duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of -chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser -degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the -pioneers? - -But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that -individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and -preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering -itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but, -victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not -withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from -openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already -pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers -in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were -always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in -calling a relief from restraint. - -We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were -subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the -most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most -complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances -where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most -general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was -the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a -life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the -necessity of making money, of succeeding--the same impulse had brought -him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain -was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from -attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised -and because to have done so would have required just those expressions -of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other -hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of -all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those -outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his -companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never -"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged -physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. -"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty -years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have -lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still -retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that -would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out -into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in -the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his -instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had -to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a -life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he -became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of -individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship of public -opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada. - -Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some -kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, -since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, -had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the -artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, -far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark -Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in -order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he -acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his -individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, -his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different" -or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how -urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society -where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself -by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his -profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing -at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see -from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of -his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was -always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his -humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men -laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short, -of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief -in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those -acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of -consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious -jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will -hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he -could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those -conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this -vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time -keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming -his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a -relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose -investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, -the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of -expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic -effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke -or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely -safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist -in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of -those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of -one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than -the editors had spoken each of the other")--his comrades were able, -without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own -exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred -and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship -that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain -himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to -maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the -position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader. - -For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular -ferocity. The very titles of his Western I sketches reveal their general -character: "The Dutch Nick Massacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing -Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Cæsar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in -the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his -labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the -doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the -phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to -kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead -Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape -hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It -began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a -special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; -but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was -"unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, -the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, -in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt -officials--we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own -painfully honest brother Orion--were frankly afraid of him. "He was very -far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any -way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even -from trying to be a humorist! - -Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik -Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, -found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all -that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down -upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not -enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man -with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same -way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own -childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of -Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged -by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his -antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of -satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest -of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in -him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his -pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated -and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike -he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is -the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in -corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of -things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not -seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was -an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, -their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change -things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a -counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very -moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive -instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to -express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have -led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an -end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as -human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired -Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief -they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could -not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been -compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He -had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a -campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine -says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As -a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote -criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the -result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco -papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a -correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we -are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long -restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the -"humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in -California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from -expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in -short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to -remain a humorist. - -In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover -the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who -found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter -of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no -value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same -trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." -Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he -had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps -we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor -consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't -know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as -surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists -of a sort who lack the courage to admit it. - -Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I -say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to -carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of _The Galaxy,_ to -which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct -a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" -his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a -humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have -already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the -pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the -rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business -men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. -The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for -ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national -demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by -Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at -last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact. - -I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the -Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of -Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly -homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we -have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile -because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or -restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us -feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile _because_! -In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The -"cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all -his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and -as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far -from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in -these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and -even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark -Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches -in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, -lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small -harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances -of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; -but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, -all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the -same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than -the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's -humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the -same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is -to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" -that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us -from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to -murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from -the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us -to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a -phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the -last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is -the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the -demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he -made upon his environment, had become, _pari passu_, progressively more -stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as -barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why -perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment -favorable for a régime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who -has risen," the typical American, himself a business man? - -Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of -succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but -complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the -stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general -"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been -characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation -was practically organized--by a sort of common consent--on the plan of -a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed -to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and æsthetic -development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised -the success of the business régime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark -Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to -the efficiency of this business régime, because it helped to maintain -the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as -it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the -Western pioneer. - -As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business -man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the -"strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an -aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he -find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way -and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an -aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, -diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the -creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic -coöperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts -for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that -expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." -Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional -freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a -retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: -consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, -confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On -the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, -everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, -reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and -responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual -and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor -does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought--and -especially irreverent toward them!--when they gave him a seat below the -salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and -absurd everything of a spiritual, æsthetic and intellectual nature the -recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the -smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as -we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at -antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an -infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being. -That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a -hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the -spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, -involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader -to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional -stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all -these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure -in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much -as the pioneer. - -Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether -they corroborate this argument. - -In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself -seated directly behind a young girl: - - How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she - would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own - thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer - pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy - dreams,--no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit - still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of - a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young - figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the - gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, - tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy - cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy - rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and - so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did - mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red - lips parted, and out leaped her thought,--and with such a - guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just _know_ - I've got five hundred fleas on me!" - -This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its -tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all -the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them -so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in -hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, -prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting -into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a -pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by -a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself -evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no -longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a -butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in -the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to -his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions. - -Another example, the famous "oesophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph -of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story": - - It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The - lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, - hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge - provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that - have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; - the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow - flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep - of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous - flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty - sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; - everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of - God. - -We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury -of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its -various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most -careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's -sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation -of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and -thus divert the reader's feeling for it. - -To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life -of the man with an eye single to the main chance--that, one would almost -say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one -of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house -down in order to roast his pig--he destroys, that is to say, an entire -complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single -sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are -manifestations of just that personal, æsthetic or moral distinction -which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish. -Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on -General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous -assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the -human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of -the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success -of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the -final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a -democratic régime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition -of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the -fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a -business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is, -however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious -schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," -says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather -hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him -into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark -Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that -in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for -this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook -his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To -exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our -humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from -any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be -abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" -was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of -beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd -pioneer business man. - -How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The -Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological -moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of -industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become -obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it -was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe! -Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's -own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything -of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were -ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be -ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual -development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that -would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too -costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not -only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate -pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as -Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and -all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind -were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, -yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was -notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial -philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in -civilization, of modern America. "I find your people--your best people, -I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only -talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's -novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there -seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in -their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of -the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of -cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The -Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's "Leaves of -Grass," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one -hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Grass," -having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its -whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that -is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the -individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a -commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true -spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring -every traveling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure of -its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so -far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and -the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far -as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing -satisfaction of Americans with a banker's paradise in which, as long as -it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled. - -So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. I -think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought -him. And are we not already in a position to see why the rôle of -humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, -why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own -development? - -Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of -the artist. It meant the suppression of his æsthetic desires, the -degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How -can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end -becoming the victim of his own habit? - -I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved -the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and -delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love -for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for -charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the -Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish -knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands -on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing -something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business -man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation -of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he -continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more -advanced æsthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one -of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the -irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: -one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually -"taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty -becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of -art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven." -In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions -of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. -Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective -coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by -stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself -a scarred child. - -He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day -come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal -humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was -satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great -purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of -which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was -he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he -lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the -"sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his -proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of -moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual -position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating -stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the -indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the -energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became -but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his -"high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by -saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as -fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of -harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that -world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked -everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an -endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that -equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out -of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can -appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after -all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief -life-saver." - - - - -CHAPTER X - -LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - - - "No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence - of ladies." - - _A Double-Barrelled Detective Story_. - - -"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your -works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political -tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain -himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant -intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle which he was, if one may say -so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. -Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with -Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, -Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, -that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him -thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that -extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance -of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the -wish for the deed? - -What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds -up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the -inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is -Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the -obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up to the measure -on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, -intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the -intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism -of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is -embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely -conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain -cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he -did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government -his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly -speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and -government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil -community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view -of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes -for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the -fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? -Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social -life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of -our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own -humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the -support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities -and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw -bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else -begin." - -It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be -sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his -nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, -despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, -he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand -for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so -involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he -could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his -friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to -him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen -that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great -impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even -feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the -wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead -of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and -even flattered it. - -If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to -be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the -puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author -of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of -sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to -divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his -generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric -clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled -away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. -But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are -beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in -assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills -out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been. - -When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small -change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty -aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos -of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see -that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he -says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity -toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct -without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing -from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his -father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's -a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He -delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms -as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after -to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who -is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as -impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at -night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One -was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't -say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was -interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle -Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and -it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of -interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the -continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages -indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior -cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the -satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can -substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has -abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark -Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his -instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, -political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in -private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave -conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made -progress--the first progress in 'ages and ages'--colossal progress. In -what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which -add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But -the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The -materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that -there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was -before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is -a vast change (due to them) in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and -all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme -ideal--all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations -named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the -world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This -lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, -dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of -Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that -he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the -great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, -that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his -friends were the unconscious agents of the business régime, bent upon -deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have -seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering? - -Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was -perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed -into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what -did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country -some of these days when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the -spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich -writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark -Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary -confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the -financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path -of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a -brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read -'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a -cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked -on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those -days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 -or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, -excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to -eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry -Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by -the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great -centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. -If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have -been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested -for his first important book--"The New Pilgrim's Progress"--was regarded -in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing -Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only -when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed -to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but -loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same -gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: -it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose -"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is -obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to -attack them? - -His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it -is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," -that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the -frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a -sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the -readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he -could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky -note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, -that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of -the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" -lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the -case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not -noticing these little spots on the American sun? - -In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems -frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen -that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief -embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been -the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of -speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are -all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and -generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and -politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there -are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed -out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly -animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact -the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand -old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its -devasting irony about every American institution save family -life--Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education -and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's -final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet -the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth -lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain -number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to -redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so--for the story -was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford--by -making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up -young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the -softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, -for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had -the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? -"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but -had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He -welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint -authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a -return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; -Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the -sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one -might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the -West. - -Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an -accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was -too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this -earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg"--not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever -again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of -industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great -Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as -"a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we -know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had -once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, -"that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too -often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that -having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels -backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he -feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the -seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth -century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century -France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The -Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again -the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a -contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the -"Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark -Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King -Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on -corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he -not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who -are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's -biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, -begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form -that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to -estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, -in his private memoranda--"do right and you will be conspicuous." - -Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's -intention and failure in his predestined rôle, the "Connecticut Yankee" -itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the -most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. -Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in -writing it. - -What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he -says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for -America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their -sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to -me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good -intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level -of manhood in turn." - -No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have -blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of -him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. -Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating -gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always -have been slightly irritating--he was irritating even at home, and how -much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to -dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw -red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon -General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, -an attack upon America _and_ upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark -Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book -as the publisher of General Grant, upon his _amour-propre_ as the -countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like -a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a -typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're -another!"--just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul -Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to -put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis -and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of -the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a -frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could -not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities -like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't -tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all -that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered -both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole -English race, indeed, to come and knock them off. - -Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a -satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in -the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, -unconsciously, into a sort of _bouleversement_ of all his actual -personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds -himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up -the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher -level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but -to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In -short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to -do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee -mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours -ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of -the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were -sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages. - -Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's -genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did -not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle -years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his -letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was -absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can -see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A -Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old -Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and -Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to -Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and -thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear -date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my -word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there -was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I -to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; -there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this -progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of -Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that -he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he -proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to -those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something -rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a -land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being -possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up -to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the -inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average -rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous -wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the -seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about -that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected -from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it -might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of -space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he -calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there -is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace--_the approval of -his neighbors and the public_. And perhaps there is something which he -dreads more than he dreads pain--the _disapproval_ of his neighbors and -the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the -disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their -approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous -letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by -deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only -wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in -even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated -classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always -hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to -instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can -get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to -"pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its -objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles -of simple folk! They are the most successful of all. - -The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark -Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection -and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he -records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here -if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. -Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its -institutions"--its institutions, observe--"its fair rural aspects, he -had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; -against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so -admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons -for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed -him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first -English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many -of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English -readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark -Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class -of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that -Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful -heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? -But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, -as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid -its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their -hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, -merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately -desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have -already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of -this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was -this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely -personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in -reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark -that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was -his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public -figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, -in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his -responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of -humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with -him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was -measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without -hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like -the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people -immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the -situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford -neighbors, who had taken him into _their_ hearts and homes?--that was -the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could -not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned -enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize--he was -boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to -satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize -not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won. - -Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine -tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was -badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was -highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the -"Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business -with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author, -we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the -publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be -popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have -been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the -top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the -exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial -pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make -King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?-- -"Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck -and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest -field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the -English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting -the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the -great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks -neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he -wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain -had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the -spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the -magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, -less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also. - -"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it." -Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that -remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable -only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long -deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom -Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be -read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find -him adding: "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." Tell the truth or trump--but get the -trick! - -Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal -processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, -that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success -and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two -letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who -was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive -feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, -as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings -and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable -way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for -his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody -contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, -Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to _mail_ this letter; he understands -that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no -harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a -volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his -crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he -would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one -writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a -very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot -embers in it here and there." - -Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask -himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he -accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the -priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the -accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and -cannot employ it. - -Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark -Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he -finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to -dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. -To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the -premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the -most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, -that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would -have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been -arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those - illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, - obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the - Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war - into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all - respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I - taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to - modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. - MARK. - - DEAR COLONEL--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a - lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK. - -And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that -he announced he was going to show it to the Czar: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the - illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing - but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war - with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty - centuries history will not get done admiring these men who - attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved - it. MARK TWAIN. - -Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful -fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To -Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' -stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had -told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. -'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up -and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. -'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men -can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' -He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he -was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions -and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! -And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in -this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment -to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible -playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars -up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to -support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation." - -Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain -was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes -to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far -more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was -always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to -America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his -aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him -a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious -wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into -the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir -in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position -carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders -to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal -ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, -was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of -reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who -appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. -"The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more -intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the -affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and -punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure -punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a -cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts -which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all -respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I -think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, -boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect -upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or -Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an -assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of -"brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most -pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer. - -This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the -Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who -attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other -hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what -everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society -Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but -monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who -took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in -actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it -appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, -as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the -nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, -the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could -not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the -spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, -for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the -spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was -personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. -Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to -print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion -behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was -the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents -Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by -disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered -the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own -genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a -whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold -quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding. - -Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old -age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared -to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's -biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled -satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an -impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those -merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance -upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him -to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer -interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his -childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; -he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of -his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he -imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. -He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought -in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, -"needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have -done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we -see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and -Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. -Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he -never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The -religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he -meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't -he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those -theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes -about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from -his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his -environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think -of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make -people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with -infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to -curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes -in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, -in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells -Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs -and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. -2006--which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment -of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," -saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so -far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs -one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the -trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the -publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk. - -Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered -life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had -found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth -and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The -absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous -conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's -pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven -is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote -in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he -dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a -single feature in it that he _actually values_. It consists--utterly -and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on -the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do -not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are -singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about -two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in -a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not -many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have -variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you -have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented -a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is -like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too -rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the -tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, -in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent -impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of -"Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, -something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the -civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the -illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what -civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in -his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a -world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen -it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, -"until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating -sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut -Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, -and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted -nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim -of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of -life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol -promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that -is pathology. - -Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was -always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he -oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture -of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification -or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the -satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an -ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, -never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also -that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the -works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 -Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. -Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a -man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and -looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a -billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it -with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might -say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect -it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have -the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the -picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is -able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple -contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never -completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they -invariably led into this _cul-de-sac_. If life is really futile, then -writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make -life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility -is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it -might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it _is_ -full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present -sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never -attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in -the air. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -MUSTERED OUT - - - "... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the - others were all still asleep." DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI. - - -And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly -liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him -and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his -defeat. - -"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday -speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe -no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a -time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your -term, well or less well, and you are mustered out." - -What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon -his life? - -"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," -"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived -in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the -public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we -print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries -and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot -had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once -and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the -creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and -he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write -frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of -Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you -ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose -opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic -naïveté of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought -or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential -priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross -and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, -immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt -contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your -immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined -to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found -out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is -true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence -of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so -doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far -from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering -forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of -youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; -you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of -the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain -thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out." - -His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy -years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and -awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have -oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon -your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck -Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with -Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in -this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has -become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, -unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant -growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in -matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of -national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches -now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played -this rôle in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the -clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain -perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": -the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world -as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd -it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly -fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous -nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the -more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the -vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon -the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of -the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any -one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general -spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who -said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize -that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for -the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient -earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything -essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was -always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of -thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three -times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a -watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the -farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the -gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own -career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the -sort of courage he described in his story "Luck." - -"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so -little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak -out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he -continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same -seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor -(privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my -conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. -There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal -to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said -some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will -not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did -he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise -we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not -rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long -habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double -personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to -redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and -comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had -kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not -sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had -kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of -the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old -imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long -deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How -it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a -little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark -Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the -truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week -he found that he no longer had the strength. - -Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to -Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing -for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and -have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance -to write a book without reserves--a book which should take account of no -one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, -illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my -heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I -judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is -under way, now, and it _is_ a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book -was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing -it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his -desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil -upon the passion that possessed him. At once this craving reasserted -itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?" -He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his -friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he -felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire -still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind -on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a -mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path -out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he -writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden -emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous, -however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into -later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men -in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him": -there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth -now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth--anything that it would -hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored -the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother -Orion to write an autobiography that would spare nobody's feelings and -would let all the cats out of the bag: "Simply tell your story to -yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing," he -had told him. Let Orion do it! we can almost hear him whispering to -himself; and Orion had done it. "It wrung my heart," wrote Mr. Howells -of that astounding manuscript, "and I felt haggard after I had finished -it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had -found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was -himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as -Mr. Paine tells us, "a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even -his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down." To write such -a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed -what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for -autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for -confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to -redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something -unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who -spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in -the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of -himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and -plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be -mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom," -he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, -"because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with -theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; -you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm -and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's -indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells, -who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really -indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast -advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against -the sluice-gates of a human soul? - -At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to -be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his -autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he -has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter--the passage is to -be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my -seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six -hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published -in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish -and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall -continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It -is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some -folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons -mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is -something awful." - -You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has -been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a -debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things -about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to -shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about -her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three -"playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but -still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and -Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright -campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in -Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to -exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of -humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the -use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain -universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human -soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that -whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and -space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are -so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your -pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the -mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of -cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going -to have--what magnificently wicked fun! - -You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own -redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book -it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And -what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy -occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are -going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were -published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were -carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in -reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it -in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the -courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his -soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among -the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_ -gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been -dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have -thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I -am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on -paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired -when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I -should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike -them out when I came to revise this book." - -Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark -Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge -Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be -a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the -person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture -to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved -himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what -inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral -slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense -that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to -communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is -Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the -writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will -in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was -incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors. -There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, -if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of -founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at -Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market -value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; -but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was -not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without -the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his. -"It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is -nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys, -in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the -fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had -a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to -publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge -of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually -shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably -have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was -received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _exposé_ of -philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just, -that very generous public verdict--for the book is, in fact, quite -worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain--he must have -felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular rôle of a -Mephistopheles. - -With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the -repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that -civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen -from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference -and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported -by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm -heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and -oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of -the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable -corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in -South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; -Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the -Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering -the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark -Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of -the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive, -the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of -all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore -this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and -weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it -was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone -aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic -attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following -the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his -book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and -"A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against -bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him. -Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his -"Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the -forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit. -Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who -have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the -sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark -Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, -equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juarès and the -volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of -a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level, -and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his -animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and -despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself. - -The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his -energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or -another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly -destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a -will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my -feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on -paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become -definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his -great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can -doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks! -Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he -not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department -on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, -when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, -when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible -passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle -pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day -and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not -a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I -have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end -to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says? -Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human -race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was -it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for -means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian -Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy -frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack -upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the -failure in himself. - -And this failure was the failure of the artist in him. - -Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy -in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life -which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire -except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel, -and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old -masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with -anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it -and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I -have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to -do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort -would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what -had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious -sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The -Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime -creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator -of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an -impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born -artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist -destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in -the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious -he is, even this early, of all æsthetic pretensions! What a fierce -grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the -perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle, -he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all -Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of -tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the -peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a -low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark -Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; -he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is -the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to -desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp -unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously -desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, -why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to -produce only one himself, and that a failure. - -We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative -life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates -nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a -machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the -animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he -said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say -nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of -the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is -astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a -retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could -have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind. -But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging -his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off -the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in -the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults -him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in -Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle -expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to -believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon -knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer--see what Macaulay says! Macaulay, -heaven bless us all!--therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark -Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry -Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the -sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who -asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training -makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce -that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written. -But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel -Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had -not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can -hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to -follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession -revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on -faith. - -How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of -his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently -that it was "like the sky--you can't break through anywhere." How much -it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an -irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to -do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in -Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius -is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its -eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior -circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, -upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his -intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for -the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe -with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and -unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no -outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no -outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a -valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would -have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced -something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, -associations and training. In France he would have produced something -better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and -training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to -Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is -enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we -can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking -reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his -half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as -"large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age. - -Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that -we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order -to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, -destroy us, we embrace them with an _amor fati_, to escape from the -contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave -who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, -finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the -possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself. -The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly -temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, -nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep -emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it -honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the -slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and -thirst for freedom. - -Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential -force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in -Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that -fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If -the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in -fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for -greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued -against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will: -he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a -will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose -regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no -spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where -success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is -a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place -of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the -first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be -weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that -Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it -is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How -well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain! -"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human -being is under training. It is his human environment which influences -his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his -road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself -shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval -he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the -way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the -tragedy of it. - -Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark -Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human -mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine -anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a -single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind -from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind -carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which -act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All -day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and -without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 -thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before -his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain -cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as -the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and -controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental -machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of -ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any -help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the -multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen -minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases. -It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite -of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely -independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better -have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark -Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, -chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks -and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't -listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and -wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of -personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, -that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in -these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with -each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book -regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch -inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal -conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the -end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul! - -The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary -psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance. -And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express -through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I -generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not -those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these -"three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me -at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in -the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life -that has been unfolded in these pages. - -"There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being -in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a -living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about -those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought -that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I -am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell -whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. - -"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to -the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am -always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be -funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only -making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they -commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing -there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." - -I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas -that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark -Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to -think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought -of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow," -the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself -inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second -dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing -self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream -worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always -"trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has -lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great -surrender. - -Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment -when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda -packet: - -"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which -the title-rôle of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of -this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The -other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon -him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at -me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out -of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't -want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always -expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'" - -No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have -had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; -but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for -good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess -alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity -of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said -Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks -and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have -ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born -artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that -he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be -"original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship -even over his neckties--the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, -has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily! - -And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about -on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most -ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, -the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by -all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic -sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the -end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an -illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the -creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those -three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of -conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is -the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own -conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He -was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that -has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for -missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says -John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, -"who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of -things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the -end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability -begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new -turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces -of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confrères -have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask -yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and -walk the stage as poets do. - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42225-8.txt or 42225-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/2/2/42225/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - - - -</pre> - - -<h1>THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN</h1> - -<h3>BY</h3> - -<h2>VAN WYCK BROOKS</h2> - - -<p style="margin-left: 35%;"><br /><br />"<i>Think it over, dear B—! A man's gifts are<br /> -not a property: they are a duty."</i></p> - -<p style="margin-left: 50%;">—IBSEN'S <i>Letters</i><br /><br /></p> - - -<h5>1922</h5> - -<h5>LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN</h5> - -<hr class="full" /> - - -<h4>TO E.S.B.</h4> - - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<h4>CONTENTS</h4> - - -<div style="text-align: center; font-size: 0.8em;"> -<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary=""> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">THE GILDED AGE</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IN THE CRUCIBLE</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VI.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">X.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN</a></td></tr> -<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">XI.</td><td align="left"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">MUSTERED OUT</a></td></tr> -</table></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h3>THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN</h3> - - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></h4> - -<h3>INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the -deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the -race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and -for the same reason."—<i>Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's -books.</i></p></blockquote> - - -<p>To those who are interested in American life and letters there has been -no question of greater significance, during the last few years, than the -pessimism of Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his own -friends and contemporaries were rather inclined to make light of his -oft-expressed belief that man is the meanest of the animals and life a -tragic mistake.</p> - -<p>For some time before his death Mark Twain had appeared before the public -in the rôle less of a laughing philosopher than of a somewhat gloomy -prophet of modern civilization. But he was old and he had suffered many -misfortunes and the progress of society is not a matter for any one to -be very jubilant about: to be gloomy about the world is a sort of -prerogative of those who have lived long and thought much. The public -that had grown old with him could hardly, therefore, accept at its face -value a point of view that seemed to be contradicted by so many of the -facts of Mark Twain's life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him -intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of -his "pose" regarding "the damned human race," and we know the opinion of -his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was "not a pessimist in his -heart, but only by premeditation." These views were apparently borne out -by his own testimony. "My temperament," he wrote, shortly after the -death of his daughter Jean, "has never allowed my spirits to remain -depressed long at a time." That he remained active and buoyant to the -end was, in fact, for his associates, sufficient evidence that his -philosophical despair was only an anomaly, which had no organic part in -the structure of his life.</p> - -<p>Was it not natural that they should feel thus about him, those -contemporaries of his, so few of whom had seen his later writings and -all the tell-tale private memoranda which Mr. Paine has lately given to -the world? What a charmed life was Mark Twain's, after all! To be able -to hold an immense nation in the hollow of one's hand, to be able to -pour out into millions of sympathetic ears, with calm confidence, as -into the ears of a faithful friend, all the private griefs and intimate -humors of a lifetime, to be called "the King" by those one loves, to be -so much more than a king in reality that every attack of gout one has is -"good for a column" in the newspapers and every phrase one utters -girdles the world in twenty minutes, to be addressed as "the Messiah of -a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents"—what -more could Tom Sawyer, at least, have wished than that? And Mark Twain's -fame was not merely one of sentiment. If the public heart was moved by -everything that concerned him,—an illness in his household, a new -campaign against political corruption, a change of residence, and he was -deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won -the world's pity when he got into debt and the world's praise when he -got out of it, he was no sort of nine days' wonder; his country had made -him its "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in -appointing himself, as he said, "ambassador-at-large of the United -States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all -official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over "The -Innocents Abroad" and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices -to the day when the newspapers were freely proposing that he ought to -have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the -Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first -time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and -private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and -his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his -opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a -sort of incarnation of the character and quality of modern America. -"Everywhere he moved," says Mr. Paine, "a world revolved about him." In -London, in Vienna, his apartments were a court, and traffic rules were -modified to let him pass in the street. A charmed life, surely, when we -consider, in addition to this public acclaim, the tidal waves of wealth -that flowed in upon him again and again, the intense happiness of his -family relations, and the splendid recognition of those fellow-members -of his craft whose word to him was final—Kipling, who "loved to think -of the great and godlike Clemens," and Brander Matthews, who freely -compared him with the greatest writers of history, and Bernard Shaw, who -announced that America had produced just two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe -and Mark Twain. Finally, there was Mr. Howells, "the recognized critical -Court of Last Resort in this country," as he called him. Did not Mr. -Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: "Your foundations -are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, -and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"?</p> - -<p>The spectators of this drama could hardly have been expected to take -the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously, and all the more because he -totally refuted the old and popular notion that humorists are always -melancholy. I have already quoted the remark he made about his -temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life, four months -before his own death. It is borne out by all the evidence of all his -years. He was certainly not one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue -natures, those June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day -long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He was an August nature, -given to sudden storms and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with -electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, -and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he -was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child -in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter -where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope -preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine -temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," -he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this -footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly <i>happy</i> -than I am I defy the world to produce him and <i>prove</i> him." And it seems -always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in his triumphs on the -platform or indulging his "rainbow-hued impulses" on paper, we see him -again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he was -expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress assembled, -"happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in -his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: -"Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know -my temperament"?</p> - -<p>And his physical health was just what one might expect from this, from -his immense vitality. He was subject to bronchial colds and he had -intermittent attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his health -appears to have been as perfect as his energy was inexhaustible. "I have -been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years," he writes -in 1875; from all one gathers he might have made the same statement -twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at fifty, at -sixty, at seventy—during that extraordinary period, well within the -memory of people who are still young, when he had solved his financial -difficulties by going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine says, -"like a debutante in her first season,"—the days when people called him -"the Belle of New York": "By half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had -danced all those people down—and yet was not tired, merely breathless. -I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at -work on this letter to you." And again, the next year, his sixtieth -year, when he had been playing billiards with H.H. Rogers, until Rogers -looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you ever get tired?": "I was -able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like. Don't you -remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the -villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I -get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one -daylight nap since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testimony -of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, during the last five -years of his life when, even at seventy-four, he was still playing -billiards "9 hours a day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human -being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a -young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the -night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh -and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He -smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the -billiard-table with the light step of youth. At 3 or 4 o'clock in the -morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my -weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of -his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least -suggestion of fatigue."</p> - -<p>Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his intimates, had ever -in their eyes,—this darling of all the gods. No wonder they were -inclined to take his view of "the damned human race" as rather a -whimsical pose; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it so even -if they had known, generally known, that he had a way of referring in -private to "God's most elegant invention" as not only "damned" but also -"mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are always supposed to be -that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about -the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an -abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to -explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its -stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and -Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment." -All his closest friends were accustomed to little notes like this: "I -have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing -that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and -hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put -in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race." -Might not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that?</p> - -<p>Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's writings which only a -succeeding generation can really have, it might be possible to explain -in this objective way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism -which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The change in tone -between the poetry of the first half of "Life on the Mississippi" and -the dull notation of the latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp -Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," -with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," -that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, -along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the -reader for taking his text at its face value—all this might be -attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and -family sorrow. If he was always manifesting, in word and deed, his deep -belief that life is inevitably a process of deterioration,—well, did -not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it not, is it not, a -popular American dogma that "the baddest children are better than the -goodest men"? A race of people who feel this way could not have thought -there was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims like these:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he -will not bite you. This is the principal difference between -a dog and a man.</p> - -<p>It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to -hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other -to get the news to you.</p></blockquote> - -<p>They could hardly have been surprised at the bitter, yes, even the -vindictive, mockery of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," at Mark -Twain's definition of man as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted -neither "to supply the coffee nor turn the crank," at his recurring -"plan" to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the -air for a period of two minutes.</p> - -<p>Has not the American public, with its invincible habit of "turning -hell's back-yard into a playground," gone so far even as to discount -"The Mysterious Stranger," that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole -of cruel nonsense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank -assertion that slavery, hypocrisy and cowardice are the eternal destiny -of man? Professor Stuart P. Sherman, who likes to defend the views of -thirty years ago and sometimes seems to forget that all traditions are -not of equal validity, says of this book that it "lets one into a -temperament and character of more gravity, complexity and interest than -the surfaces indicated." But having made this discovery, for he is -openly surprised, Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and -unexpected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had known before: "What -Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in monarchies, -aristocracies, tribal religions and—minorities bent on mischief, and -making a bludgeon of the malleable many." And, after all, he says, "the -wicked world visited by the mysterious stranger is sixteenth century -Austria—not these States." But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in -reality Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through -whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations of Huck Finn and Tom -Sawyer, those characters which, as we know from a hundred evidences, -haunted Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any rate, Mark -Twain's boys, and whoever compares their moral attitude with that of the -boys of Mark Twain's prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into -his soul. "We boys wanted to warn them"—Marget and Ursula, against the -danger that was gathering about them—"but we backed down when it came -to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor -brave enough to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get us into trouble." What, is this Mark Twain speaking, the -creator of Huck and Tom, who gladly broke every law of the tribe to -protect and rescue Nigger Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly enough nor -brave enough" to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get them into trouble? Can we, in the light of this, continue to -say that Mark Twain's pessimism was due to anything so external as the -hatred of tyranny, and a sixteenth century Austrian tyranny at that? Is -it not perfectly plain that that deep contempt for man, the -"coffee-mill," a contempt that has spread now even to the boy-nature of -which Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have had some -far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate -chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not -the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no -relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.</p> - -<p>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"—a strange -complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to -live.</p> - -<p>Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all -his others—his last breath.</p></blockquote> - -<p>And that paragraph about the death of his daughter, so utterly -inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes to himself: "My life is a -bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most -precious of all gifts—the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor -—death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to -life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; -and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions, to -one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that: but at least one of -them is that, not to the writer's apprehension, but in the writer's -experience, life has been in some special way a vain affliction.</p> - -<p>Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of Mark Twain's -pessimism? Can we attribute it, with Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt -under which he labored now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the -death of those he loved? No, for these things would have modified his -temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, -checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of -brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own -testimony, the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever knew, he -lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of life he had neither more -nor less than other men, and they affected him neither more nor less. To -say anything else would be to contradict the whole record of his -personality.</p> - -<p>No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted Mark Twain, a -malady common to many Americans, perhaps, if we are to judge from that -excessive interest in therapeutics which he shared with so many millions -of his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark Twain's later -history which has received too little attention. "Whether it was -copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice," -says Mr. Paine—to approach this subject on its broadest side—"he -rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would -provide physical or mental easement for his species." And here again the -general leads to the particular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender -heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts -of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he -and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near -losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in -their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that -momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor -Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method -that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles -about it, bombarding his friends with letters of appreciation and -recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave -most of his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea for all -human ills which osteopathy could not reach." There was Christian -Science to which, in spite of his attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat -equivocal book he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and -as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest converts," who -"never lost faith in its power." And lastly, there was the "eclectic -therapeutic doctrine" which he himself put together piecemeal from all -the others, to the final riddance of <i>materia medica</i>.</p> - -<p>We have seen what Mark Twain's apparent health was. Can we say that this -therapeutic obsession was due to the illnesses of his family, which -were, indeed, unending? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant -stimulus to the obsession—the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine," for -instance, did, quite definitely, rise up out of the midst of them. But -it is plain that there had to be an element of "soul-cure" in these -various healings for Mark Twain to be interested in them, that what -interested him in them <i>was</i> the "soul-cure," the "mind-cure." Can he -say too much in praise of Christian Science for its "healing of the -spirit," its gift of "buoyant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from -care"? In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental healing -began at a time when he and his family alike were free from illness. It -is in 1886, when Mark Twain was at the very, summit of his fame, when he -was the most successful publisher in the world, when he was at work on -his most ambitious book, when he was "frightened," as he said, at the -proportions of his prosperity, when his household was aglow with -happiness and well-being, that his daughter Susy notes in her diary: -"Papa has been very much interested of late in the 'mind-cure' theory." -It might be added that he was about at the age when, according to his -famous aphorism, a man who does not become a pessimist knows too little -about life.</p> - -<p>In fact, the more one scans the later pages of Mark Twain's history the -more one is forced to the conclusion that there was something gravely -amiss with his inner life. There was that frequently noted fear of -solitude, that dread of being alone with himself which made him, for -example, beg for just one more game of billiards at 4 o'clock in the -morning. There were those "daily self-eludings" that led him to slay his -own conscience in one of the most ferocious of his humorous tales. That -conscience of his—what was it? Why do so many of his jokes turn upon an -affectation, let us say, of moral cowardice in himself? How does it -happen that when he reads "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him "with -force" is Tito's compromise with his conscience? Why those continual -fits of remorse, those fantastic self-accusations in which he charged -himself, we are told, with having filled Mrs. Clemens's life with -privations, in which he made himself responsible first for the death of -his younger brother and later for that of his daughter Susy, writing to -his wife, according to Mr. Paine, that he was "wholly and solely -responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality -his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-fall, the -separation from Susy, and this final, incredible disaster"? Was there -any reason why, humorously or otherwise, he should have spoken of -himself as a liar, why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of -writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I went on now and took -him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in -literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"? -That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made him come to think -of literature as primarily, perhaps, the confession of sins—was there -anything in the moral point of view of his generation to justify it, in -this greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business, this zealous -reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be -cheaply persuadable" was, he said, the first command the Deity ever -issued to a human being on this planet, the only command Adam would -never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin of one of his -books: "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep -and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he -despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same reason."</p> - -<p>A strange enigma! "You observe," wrote Mark Twain once, almost at the -beginning of his career, "that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." That -spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The restless -movement of his life, those continual journeys to Bermuda, where "the -deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and -give his conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an -autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible," which -would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt -alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense -relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of -limitations—you have served your term, well or less well, and you are -mustered out"—how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? -For Mark Twain was right—things do not happen by chance, and the -psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain -respects that other sort of determinism in which he so almost -fanatically believed. There is no figure for the human being like the -ship, he sometimes said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his -contemporaries, just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory -of that last English welcome, the <i>Begum</i> of Bengal, stateliest of -Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it -merely an irony of circumstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of -storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea?</p> - -<p>No, there was a reason for Mark Twain's pessimism, a reason for that -chagrin, that fear of solitude, that tortured conscience, those -fantastic self-accusations, that indubitable self-contempt. It is an -established fact, if I am not mistaken, that these morbid feelings of -sin, which have no evident cause, are the result of having transgressed -some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one's nature. It is as old as -Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest -that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his -was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked -personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost -wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The -spirit of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from the -bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had never quite been -able to possess.</p> - -<p>Does this seem too rash a hypothesis? It is, I know, the general -impression that Mark Twain quite fully effectuated himself as a writer. -Mr. Howells called him the "Lincoln of our literature," Professor -William Lyon Phelps describes him as one of the supreme novelists of the -world, Professor Brander Matthews compares him with Cervantes, and -Bernard Shaw said to him once: "I am persuaded that the future historian -of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French -historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." These were views -current in Mark Twain's lifetime, and similar views are common enough -to-day. "Mark Twain," says Professor Archibald Henderson, "enjoys the -unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening -and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual -powers from the beginning to the end." To Mr. John Macy, author of what -is, on the whole, the most discerning book that has been written on our -literature, he is "a powerful, original thinker." And finally, Mr. H.L. -Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There -was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof -engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one -associates with the great artists of the Renaissance." An imposing array -of affirmations, surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few -years, during which he has become in a way so much more interesting, -have witnessed a singular change in Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly -present he is in the public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort -of archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not -continue so to be for many generations to comet Undoubtedly. By whom, -however, with the exception of two or three of his books, is he read? -Mr. Paine, I know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this day in -America in larger quantity than any other book of travel. But a number -of explanations might be given for this, as for any other mob -phenomenon, none of which has anything to do with literary fame in the -proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by the delight and -stimulus which he gives to mature spirits in the present, and time, it -seems to me, tends to bear out the assertion of Henry James that Mark -Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry Finn," -"Tom Sawyer," a story or two like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a -sketch or two like "Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of -"Life on the Mississippi,"—these, in any case, can already be said to -have "survived" all his other work. And are these writings, however -beautiful and important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic -genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes? -Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that prevails to-day when he -called their author the "divine amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" -and "Tom Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent, as -complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality."</p> - -<p>So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not -been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled -almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him? When -his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, they -were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they -had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a -creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his -prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of -his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique -magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot -help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American -writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like -Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if -intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth -to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his -associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian -would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the -horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of -one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what -Mr. Howells says: "Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities -that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final -personality was something exquisite." That combination of barbaric force -and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him—is there not -about it something portentous, something that suggests the true lord of -life? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic -atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were -the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their -impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one -of the fixed stars had fallen in space.</p> - -<p>This was the force, this the energy which, through Mark Twain's pen, -found such inadequate expression. He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a -"divine amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called -it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way -of saying, in the latter case, that his was a mind that had not -developed, and in the former, that his was a splendid genius which had -never found itself?</p> - -<p>It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own self-estimate. His -judgments were, as Mr. Paine says, "always unsafe": strictly speaking, -he never knew what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the -time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against -his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark -Twain's estimate of himself it is no conscious judgment of his career -one has in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the judgment of his -unconscious self. This he revealed unawares in all sorts of ways.</p> - -<p>There were times when he seemed to share the complacent confidence of so -many others in his immortal fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his -large, loose, easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live a -couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a -fresh start and live the rest of the time." And Mr. Paine says that as -early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers a -contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one -hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with -his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this -must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty -confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain -was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he -did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of -megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest -rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous -episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I -wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, -I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American -writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident -in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it became a -historic event: it was for him, plainly, of an exceptional significance, -and all his love for gorgeous trappings could never account for the -delight he had in that doctor's gown—"I would dress that way all the -time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine—which became for him a permanent -robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain at seventy-two, one of the most -celebrated men in the world, could not have cared so much for it if it -had been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must have served -in some way also to vindicate him in his own eyes; he seized upon it as -a sort of talisman, as a reassurance from what he considered the highest -court of culture, that he really was one of the elect.</p> - -<p>Yes, that naïve passion for the limelight, for "walking with kings" and -hobnobbing with job lots of celebrities, that "revelling," as Mr. Paine -calls it, "in the universal tribute"—what was its root if not a deep -sense of insecurity, a desire for approval both in his own eyes and in -the eyes of all the world? During those later years in New York, when he -had become so much the professional celebrity, he always timed his -Sunday morning walks on Fifth Avenue for about the hour when the -churches were out. Mr. Paine tells how, on the first Sunday morning, he -thoughtlessly suggested that they should turn away at Fifty-ninth Street -in order to avoid the throng and that Clemens quietly remarked, "I like -the throng." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the Plaza Hotel until -the appointed hour.... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid -the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on -which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was -lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the -multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as -the tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for approval and -corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a -quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted -his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"? -Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obsession: kings, -empresses, princes, archduchesses—what a part they play in his -biography! He is always dragging them in, into his stories, into his -letters, writing about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them, -and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals they have. And as -with kings, so also with great men, or men who were considered great, or -men who were merely notorious. He makes lists of those he has known, -those he has spent evenings with—Mark Twain, to whom celebrity was the -cheapest thing going! Is there not in all this the suggestion of an -almost conscious weakness clutching at strength, the suggestion of some -kind of failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of success?</p> - -<p>Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this same desire for -approval, for corroboration. Mark Twain was supported by the sentiment -of the majority, which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he had -the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the arbiter of all the -elegances; he had virtually the freedom of <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>, and -not only its freedom but a higher rate of payment than any other -<i>Atlantic</i> contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more -reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as -good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells -in 1887, "but I've always done what I could to secure and enlarge my -good opinion of it. I've always said to, myself, 'Everybody reads it and -that's something—it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable -people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by -implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and -fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, -high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody -likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a -note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the -sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, -beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He -rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an -uplifter of the masses; then, with a touch of mock-noble indignation, he -confesses to being a popular entertainer, fully convinced at least that -there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed -to put upon his book an explanatory line: "This is written for the -Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the Members." No plea more -grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great -reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant -of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a -separation between the "Head" and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, -had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for -the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain, in short, knew very well—for I think these illustrations -prove it—that there was something decidedly different between himself -and a great writer. In that undifferentiated mob of celebrities, great, -and less great, and far from great, amid which he moved for a -generation, he was a favored equal. But in the intimate presence of some -isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the -candidate for the mystagogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow -writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude. Was it Browning? -He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied -for a time with the naïve self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen? -Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin note-books: "Been taken -for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was -found the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses the word -"literature" in connection with his own work it is with a sudden -self-consciousness that lets one into the secret of his inner humility. -"I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever -been given a degree by any college in any age of the world, so far as I -know," he writes to the authorities of Yale in 1888. A man who freely -compared himself with the melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, -who, in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins," invited his readers, -who already knew how "the born and trained novelist works," to see how -the "jack-leg" does it, could never have been accused of not knowing his -true rank. "You and I are but sewing-machines," he says in "What Is -Man?" "We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care -nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out -Gobelins."</p> - -<p>I think we are in a position now to understand that boundless comic -impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic impudence which led him to propose -to Edwin Booth in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him to -telegraph to W.T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to -disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now"; which -led him, at the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum, "Why am -I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was -just asking for information." Tempting Providence, was he not, this -child of good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the fates. If -he had not had a certain sense of colossal force, it would never have -occurred to him, however humorously, to place himself on an equality -with Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the Czar and his -magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean. But, on the other hand, it -would never have occurred to him to make these comparisons if he had -felt himself in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are not -only great in energy but masters of themselves let their work speak for -them; men who are not masters of themselves, whose energy, however -great, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are -driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration -from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured -that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare -and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great -fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet -they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure -themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, -therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually -was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which -had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy -that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply -of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable -abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined -with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the -barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of -that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes -one's sole criterion the magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, -ever more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life Mark Twain -was attended by what Mr. Paine calls "psychic evidences"; he never fails -to note the marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is -always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"—he -invented the phrase; strange phenomena of nature rise up in his path. -Three times, while crossing the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each -time he takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the barbarian -conquerors of antiquity, I say, those essential opposites of the -creative spirit, whose control is altogether internal, and who feels -himself the master of his own fate, could have been more in character -than was Mark Twain when he observed, a few months before his death: "I -came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I -expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my -life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no -doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable; freaks, they came in -together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that."</p> - -<p>A comet, this time! And a few pages back we found him comparing himself -with a sewing-machine. Which is he, one, or the other, or both? He seems -to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of -extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty -solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, -confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed -to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains. A great -genius, in short, that has never attained the inner control which makes -genius great, a mind that has not found itself, a mind that does not -know itself, a spirit that cloaks to the end in the fantasy of its -temporal power the tragic reality of its own essential miscarriage!</p> - -<p>We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret of Mark Twain's -mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy of that little book which he -called his "Bible," "What Is Man?" He was extremely proud of the -structure of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a machine, -"moved, directed, commanded by <i>exterior</i> influences, <i>solely</i>," that he -is "a chameleon, who takes the color of his place of resort," that he is -"a mere coffee-mill," which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee -nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of proprietary interest and -pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he -says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving -impulse—the contenting of his own spirit—and is merely a machine and -entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly -possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in -patching and painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession -and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging -fact approaches." You see how it pleases him, how much it means to him, -that final "Truth," how he clings to it with a sort of defiant insolence -against the "imploring argument," the "damaging fact"? "Man originates -nothing," he says, "not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. -He was a machine, and machines do not create." Faith never gave the -believer more comfort than this philosophy gave Mark Twain.</p> - -<p>But is it possible for a creative mind to find "contentment" in denying -the possibility of creation? And why should any one find pride and -satisfaction in the belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the -denial of "free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and the sour -grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and tragic souls who find -comfort in saying that love exists nowhere in the world because they -themselves have missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark -Twain any pleasure to feel that he was "entitled to no personal merit" -for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he -felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of -feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to -achieve—namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, -"Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the -world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the -creative life is the very embodiment of it—the emergence, that is to -say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant, integrating -principle that turns the world he confronts into a mere instrument for -the registration of his own preferences. There is but one -interpretation, consequently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight -in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine: it brought him -comfort to feel that if he was, as he said, a "sewing-machine," it was -the doing of destiny, and that nothing he could have done himself would -have enabled him to "turn out Gobelins."</p> - -<p>From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that Mark Twain was a -frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development, and beyond this -fact, as we know from innumerable instances the psychologists have -placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of -his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even been -turned, as we shall see; against himself; the poet, the artist in him, -consequently, had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a -spiritual valetudinarian.</p> - -<p>But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to glance not only -at Mark Twain's life and work, but also at the epoch and the society in -which he lived.</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></h4> - -<h3>THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE</h3> - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is -dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, -but they are essentially not happy,"</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 60%;"><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">STENDHAL</span>: <i>On Love in the United States</i>.</p></blockquote> - - -<p><br />In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, -revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather -material for his book, "Life on the Mississippi." It was, naturally, a -profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what -his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an -assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot -of the steamer <i>Gold Dust</i> recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the -pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We -got to be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most of my -time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a -big, full river—for it was high-water season and there was no danger of -the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river—I had her -most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me -there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been -no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a -pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before."</p> - -<p>Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant, that Mark Twain -recorded in these words, a regret for the passing of time and the charm -and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his -"literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not altogether flattering -to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to -ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely "happy and -care-free" a man of Mark Twain's energy and power could hardly, in later -life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he certainly did: all his -days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a -lost paradise. "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done -in my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am a person," he -wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, "who would quit authorizing in a minute to -go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we -see; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, -that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only -by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact -that the earlier pages of "Life on the Mississippi," in which he -pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and -expressive that he ever wrote.</p> - -<p>It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong hankering for the -lost paradise of the pilot-house. It was something more organic, and -Mark Twain provides us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my -subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his book, "it is no -surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have -followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it." A singular -statement for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life, the -two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are nothing else than love -and pride! But Mark Twain writes those words with an almost unctuous -gravity of conviction, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a -pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had -not experienced it in literature. Strange as that may seem, we cannot -question it; we have, simply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi -pilot had, in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist in -him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in him had never been -satisfied again. We do not have to look beyond this in order to -interpret, if not the fact, at least the obsession. He felt that, in -some way, he had been as a pilot on the right track; and he felt that he -had lost this track. If he was always harking back to that moment, then, -it was, we can hardly escape feeling, with a vague hope of finding again -some scent that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious thread -of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it possible that he had, in -fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that -career? It is a bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark -Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to see first what sort -of boy he was, and what sort of society it was he grew up in; then we -shall be able to understand what unique opportunities for personal -growth the career of a pilot afforded him.</p> - -<p>What a social setting it was, that little world into which Mark Twain -was born! It was drab, it was tragic. In "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom -Sawyer" we see it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a -later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled in Hannibal, on -the Mississippi. He was five at the time; his eyes had opened on such a -scene as we find in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary, -discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he -says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, -desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, -wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in -some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"—it is the epic not only -of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. -How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the -scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E.H. Howe's "Story -of a Country Town," for instance, that Western counterpart in sodden -misery of "Ethan Frome"—a book which has only begun to find its public. -This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest, tells us in so -many words that in all his early days he never saw a woman who was not -anæmic and fretful, a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who -was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment. No wonder he has -come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is -no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain -himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, -dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and -foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, -some gigantic garbage-can! Human nature was not responsible for this -debris of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could human nature -rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and murder," we are told, were the -diversions of the capital city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. -It was not very different in normal times along the Mississippi. -Hannibal was a small place; yet Mr. Paine records four separate murders -which Mark Twain actually witnessed as a boy: every week he would see -some drunken ruffian run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, -he saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many gruesome -experiences," exclaims Mr. Paine, "there appear to have been in those -early days!" But let us be moderate: every one was not violent. As for -the majority of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that history -calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion, justice will never be -realistic. The gods of Greece would have gone unwashed and turned gray -at forty and lost their digestion and neglected their children if they -had been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into an irritable -silence.</p> - -<p>A desert of human sand!—the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, -for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions -after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his -letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a -dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities -may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of -existence inevitably droop and wither."</p> - -<p>Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his -mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of -Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with -John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain -"did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are -told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he -seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a -perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of -his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon -him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking -"sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. -Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent -medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals—we have it from "Tom -Sawyer"—"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were -all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, -desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, -without enough power, grating on their own metal.</p> - -<p>Little Sam, as every one called him, was the fifth child in this -household, "a puny baby with a wavering promise of life"; it is -suggested that he was not wanted. Mr. Paine speaks of him somewhere as -"high-strung and neurotic." We are not surprised, therefore, to find him -at three and four "a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies -that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a -series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as -he lay rolling in the grass." This is the child who is to retain through -life that exquisite sensibility of which so many observers have spoken. -"Once when I met him in the country," says Mr. Howells, for example, of -his later life, "he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in -bringing down a blackbird; and he described the poor, stricken, glossy -thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as -he might have given a wounded child." Already, in his infancy, his -gentle, winning manner and smile make him every one's favorite. A very -special little flower of life, you see, capable of such feeling that at -twenty-three his hair is to turn gray in the tragic experience of his -brother's death. A flower of life, a wild flower, and infinitely -fragile: the doctor is always being called in his behalf. Before he -grows up he is to have prophetic dreams, but now another neurotic -symptom manifests itself. In times of family crisis, at four, when one -of his sisters is dying, at twelve, after the death of his father, he -walks in his sleep: often the rest of the household get up in the middle -of the night to find this delicate little waif with his eyes shut -"fretting with cold in some dark corner."</p> - -<p>Can we not already see in this child the born, predestined artist? And -what sort of nurture will his imagination have? He is abandoned to the -fervid influences of the negro slaves,—for his father had moments of a -relative prosperity. Crouching in their cabins, he drinks in wild, weird -tales of blood-curdling African witchcraft. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, -"an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination -of a delicate child." One thinks indeed of an image that would have -pleased Heine, the image of a frail snow-plant of the North quivering, -flaming in the furnace of the jungle. Mark Twain appears to have been -from the outset a center of interest, radiating a singular potency; and -the more his spirit was subjected to such a fearful stimulus the more -urgently he required for his normal development the calm, clairvoyant -guidance a pioneer child could never have had. The negroes were "in real -charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment." What other -influence was there to counter-balance this?</p> - -<p>One, and one only, an influence tragic in its ultimate consequences, the -influence of Mark Twain's mother. That poor, taciturn, sunstruck -failure, John Clemens, was a mere pathetic shadow beside the woman whose -portrait Mark Twain has drawn for us in the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer." -She who was regarded as a "character" by all the town, who was said to -have been "the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best -dancer, in all Kentucky," who was still able to dance at 80, and lived -to be 87, who belonged, in short, to "the long-lived, energetic side of -the house," directed her children, we are told—and we can believe -it—"with considerable firmness." And what was the inevitable -relationship between her and this little boy? "She had a weakness," says -Mr. Paine, "for the child that demanded most of her mother's care.... -All were tractable and growing in grace but little Sam ... a delicate -little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed." In -later life, "you gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she told -him. In fact, she was always scolding him, comforting him, forgiving -him, punishing and pleading with him, fixing her attention upon him, -exercising her emotions about him, impressing it upon his mind for all -time, as we shall come to see that woman is the inevitable seat of -authority and the fount of wisdom.</p> - -<p>We know that such excessive influences are apt to deflect the growth of -any spirit. Men are like planets in this, that for them to sail clear in -their own orbits the forces of gravity have to be disposed with a -certain balance on all sides: how often, when the father counts for -nothing, a child becomes the satellite of its mother, especially when -that mother's love has not found its normal expression in her own youth! -We have seen that Mark Twain's mother did not love her husband; that her -capacity for love, however, was very great is proved by the singular -story revealed in one of Mark Twain's letters: more than sixty years -after she had quarreled with that young Lexington doctor, and when her -husband had long been dead, she, a woman of eighty or more, took a -railway journey to a distant city where there was an Old Settlers' -convention because among the names of those who were to attend it she -had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. "Who could have imagined -such a heart-break as that?" said Mr. Howells, when he heard the story. -"Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no -more noise than a grave under foot." It made no noise, but it -undoubtedly had a prodigious effect upon Mark Twain's life. When an -affection as intense as that is balked in its direct path and repressed -it usually, as we know, finds an indirect outlet; and it is plain that -the woman as well as the mother expressed itself in the passionate -attachment of Jane Clemens to her son. We shall note many consequences -of this fact as we go on with our story. We can say at least at this -point that Mark Twain was, quite definitely, in his mother's -leading-strings.</p> - -<p>What was the inevitable result? I have said, not, I hope, with too much -presumption, that Mark Twain had already shown himself the born, -predestined artist, that his whole nature manifested what is called a -tendency toward the creative life. For that tendency to become -conscious, to become purposive, two things were necessary: it must be -able, in the first place, to assert itself and in the second place to -embody itself in a vocation; to realize itself and then to educate -itself, to realize itself in educating itself. And, as we know, the -influences of early childhood are, in these matters, vitally important. -If Jane Clemens had been a woman of wide experience and independent -mind, in proportion to the strength of her character, Mark Twain's -career might have been wholly different. Had she been catholic in her -sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no matter how more than -maternal her attachment to her son was, she might have placed before him -and encouraged him to pursue interests and activities amid which he -could eventually have recovered his balance, reduced the filial bond to -its normal measure and stood on his own feet. But that is to wish for a -type of woman our old pioneer society could never have produced. We are -told that the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer" is a speaking portrait of Jane -Clemens, and Aunt Polly, as we know, was the symbol of all the taboos. -The stronger her will was, the more comprehensive were her repressions, -the more certainly she became the inflexible guardian of tradition in a -social régime where tradition was inalterably opposed to every sort of -personal deviation from the accepted type. "In their remoteness from -'the political centers of the young Republic," says Mr. Howells, in "The -Leatherwood God," of these old Middle Western settlements, "they seldom -spoke of the civic; questions stirring the towns of the East; the -commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were; -unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest." And in the slave -States it was not the abolitionist alone whose name was held, as Mr. -Paine says, "in horror," but every one who had the audacity to think -differently from his neighbors. Jane Clemens, in short, was the -embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism which had proved -so favorable to the life of enterprising action but which perceived the -scent of the devil in any least expression of what is now known as the -creative impulse. She had a kind heart, she was always repenting and -softening and forgiving; it is said that whenever she had to drown -kittens, she warmed the water first. But this, without opening any -channel in a contrary direction, only sealed her authority! She won her -points as much by kindness as by law. Besides, tradition spoke first in -her mind; her hand was quicker than her heart; in action she was the -madonna of the hairbrush. And what, specifically, was it that she -punished? Those furtive dealings of Huck and Tom with whitewash and -piracy were nothing in the world—and that is why all the world loves -them—but the first stirrings of the normal æsthetic sense, the first -stirrings of individuality.</p> - -<p>Already I think we divine what was bound to happen in the soul of Mark -Twain. The story of "Huckleberry Finn" turns, as we remember, upon a -conflict: "the author," says Mr. Paine, "makes Huck's struggle a -psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and -sympathy on the other." In the famous episode of Nigger Jim, "sympathy," -the cause of individual freedom, wins. Years later, in "The Mysterious -Stranger," Mark Twain presented the parallel situation we noted in the -last chapter: "we found," says the boy who tells that story, "that we -were not manly enough, nor brave enough to do a generous action when -there was a chance that it could get us into trouble." Conscience and -the law, we see, had long since prevailed in the spirit of Mark Twain, -but what is the conscience of a boy who checks a humane impulse but "boy -terror," as Mr. Paine calls it, an instinctive fear of custom, of tribal -authority? The conflict in "Huckleberry Finn" is simply the conflict of -Mark Twain's own childhood. He solved it successfully, he fulfilled his -desire, in the book, as an author can. In actual life he did not solve -it at all; he surrendered.</p> - -<p>Turn to the record in Mr. Paine's biography. We find Mark Twain in -perpetual revolt against all those institutions for which his mother -stood. "Church ain't worth shucks," says Tom Sawyer. As for school, "he -never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and -remained with loathing—the loathing which he always had for anything -resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of -liberty." One recalls what Huck said of Aunt Polly just before he made -his escape to the woods:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; -it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The -widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them -ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every -morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she -won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them -blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem -to any air get through 'em somehow, and they're so rotten -nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around -anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for—well, it -'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and -sweat—I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in -there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The -widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits -up by a bell—everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't -stand it."</p></blockquote> - -<p>But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally or in any other -way. He never even imagined that his feelings of revolt had any -justification. We remember how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some -escapade, they would resolve to "lead a better life" to go to church, -visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and subsist wholly upon -tracts. That was what Mark Twain did: "not to do so," says, Mr. Paine, -"was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were -heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that." -And his mother was so strong, so courageous, the only strong and -courageous influence he knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he -set them down"—the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and -beaten and sold—"as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a -taste for a better life." Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence -himself, not to play with freedom! "He felt that it was his own -conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's -idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions." Naturally! And -she "punished him and pleaded with him, alternately"—with one -inevitable result. "'To fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote -to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly described that old feeling which -I used to have"; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a -preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be -damned." Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and -preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had -become in his eyes the "bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to -mention the creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"?</p> - -<p>Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and -flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. -Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other -traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities—how can we compare -the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, -horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell -of his infancy and find a vocation there? Calvinism itself had gone to -seed: it was nothing but the dead hand of custom; the flaming priest had -long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he -could find nowhere, either in men or in books, the bread and wine of the -spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, -Frank Burrough, who had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is -record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named -Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincinnati. "They were long fermenting -discourses," Mr. Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to -that winter in Macfarlane's room." And what was the counsel which, from -that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received?—that "man's -heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only -animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness" and that his -intellect was only a "depraving addition to him which, in the end, -placed him in a rank far below the other beasts." Propitious words for -this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with -books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is a memorable picture of the -library in the typical gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to -New Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering," "Affection's -Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa," "Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's -Book," "piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an -inherited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the cultural -background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh -stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the -foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark -Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, -which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half -a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. -"It gave him his cue," says Mr. Paine, "the first word of a part in the -human drama," and he conceived a sudden interest in history and -languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the -least protection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of -fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke.</p> - -<p>In all his environment, then, we see, there was nothing to assist in the -transformation of an unconscious artistic instinct, however urgent, into -a conscious artistic purpose. "Dahomey," wrote Mark Twain once, "could -not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. -Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not -itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of -stimulating exterior circumstances." He was reciting his own story in -those words. But the circumstances that surrounded Mark Twain were not -merely passively unfavorable to his own self-discovery; they were -actively, overwhelmingly unfavorable. He was in his mother's -leading-strings, and in his mother's eyes any sort of personal -self-assertion in choices, preferences, impulses was, literally, sinful. -Thus the whole weight of the Calvinistic tradition was concentrated -against him at his most vulnerable point. His mother, whom he could not -gainsay, was unconsciously but inflexibly set against his genius; and -destiny, which always fights on the side of the heaviest artillery, -delivered, in his twelfth year, a stroke that sealed her victory.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain's father died. Let Mr. Paine picture the scene:</p> - -<p>"The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with -him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, -indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred -things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the -knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother -took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. 'It -is all right, Sammy,' she said. 'What's done is done, and it does not -matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to -promise me——.' He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung -himself into her arms. 'I will promise anything,' he sobbed, 'if you -won't make me go to school! Anything!' His mother held him for a moment, -thinking, then she said: 'No, Sammy, you need not go to school any more. -Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.' So -he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like -his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and -justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious -matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held -sacred. That night—it was after the funeral—his tendency to -somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping -together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous -at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, -they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid -on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A -thought struck Mrs. Clemens: 'Sam!' she said. He answered, but he was -sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet -around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in -succession after that. Then he slept more soundly."</p> - -<p>Who is sufficiently the master of signs and portents to read this -terrible episode aright? One thing, however, we feel with irresistible -certitude, that Mark Twain's fate was once for all decided there. That -hour by his father's corpse, that solemn oath, that walking in his -sleep—we must hazard some interpretation of it all, and I think we are -justified in hazarding as most likely that which explains the most -numerous and the most significant phenomena of his later life.</p> - -<p>To a hypersensitive child such as Mark Twain was at eleven that -ceremonious confrontation with his father's corpse must, in the first -place, have brought a profound nervous shock. Already, we are told, he -was "broken down" by his father's death; remorse had "laid a heavy hand -on him." But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? -"A hundred things in themselves trifling," which had offended, in -reality, not his father's heart but his father's will as a conventional -citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. -Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings out of this moody child, the -first wavering steps of the soul, that is what they have really been, -these peccadillos, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings -of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed; all those -crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, -are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of -that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, -with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meager traditions. -He is to go forth the Good Boy by <i>force majeure</i>, he is to become such -a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his -father's failure, to recover the lost gentility of a family that had -once been proud, to realize that "mirage of wealth" that had ever hung -before his father's eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly -with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to -remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and -all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any -fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away -childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always -a child, your mother's child! In a day to come you will write to one of -your friends, "We have no <i>real</i> morals, but only artificial -ones—morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural -and healthy instincts." Never mind that now; your mother imagines her -heart is in the balance—will you break it?... Will you promise?... And -the little boy, in the terror of that presence, sobs: "Anything!"</p> - -<p>"There is in every man," said Sainte-Beuve, "a poet who dies young." In -truth, the poet does not die; he falls into a fitful trance. It is -perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment: he became, -and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism is the proof of it, a -dual personality. If I were sufficiently hardy, as I am not, I should -say that that little sleep-walker who appeared at Jane Clemens's bedside -on the night of her husband's funeral was the spirit of Tom Sawyer, come -to demand again the possession of his own soul, to revoke that ruthless -promise he had given. He came for several nights, and then, we are told, -the little boy slept more soundly, a sign, one might say, if one were a -fortune-teller, that he had grown accustomed to the new and difficult -rôle of being two people at once! The subject of dual personality was -always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to -his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, -susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown -from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation -of consciousness. His "wish" to be an artist, which has been so frowned -upon and has encountered such an insurmountable obstacle in the -disapproval of his mother, is now repressed, more or less definitely, -and another wish, that of winning approval, which inclines him to -conform with public opinion, has supplanted it. The individual, in -short, has given way to the type. The struggle between these two selves, -these two tendencies, these two wishes or groups of wishes, will -continue throughout Mark Twain's life, and the poet, the artist, the -individual, will make a brave effort to survive. From the death of his -father onward, however, his will is definitely enlisted on the side -opposed to his essential instinct.</p> - -<p>When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on his first excursion -into the great world, he gladly takes the oath, which his mother -administers, "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is -away, an oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do what -seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has -become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey -of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. -Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record -shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was -twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East -as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter journey lasted -more than a year; one might have expected it to open before him an -immense horizon; yet he seems, to judge from his published letters to -have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts or feelings of -youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of aspiration, of hope, depression, -joy, even ambition! His letters are as full of statistics as the -travel-reports of an engineer, and the only sensation he seems to -experience is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no wish -to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He is, in fact, under a -spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits himself, even from seeking on his -own account that vital experience which is the stuff of the creative -life.</p> - -<p>Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He hears "the old call of -the river." He becomes a pilot.</p> - -<p>Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon -this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the -world was to know later—"dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to -details"—should ever have persisted in acquiring the "absolutely -limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that -Mark Twain "loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and -not only the river, but a steamboat; and still more, perhaps, the -freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine omits one -important particular. We have seen that in Mark Twain two opposed groups -of wishes—the wish to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's -approval, to stand in with pioneer society—were struggling for -survival. When we turn to his account of the Mississippi pilots, their -life, their activities, their social position, we can see that in this -career both these wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in -the first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative occupation; -besides this, of all the pioneer types of the Mississippi region, the -pilot alone embodied in any large measure the characteristics of the -artist: in him alone these characteristics were permitted, in him they -were actually encouraged, to survive.</p> - -<p>We cannot understand why this was so without bearing in mind a -peculiarity of the pioneer régime upon which we shall have occasion more -than once to dwell. Mr. Herbert Croly has described it in "The Promise -of American Life." "In such a society," says Mr. Croly, "a man who -persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting -standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His -finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than -did the current careless and hasty product and his higher standards and -peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of -his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which -naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and -uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that -the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a -special vocation and high standards of achievement. Such a man did -insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under -the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value. -Consequently, they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with -special vocations."</p> - -<p>Here, of course, we have what is by far the most important fact to be -considered in any study of the creative life in the West; as we shall -see, Mark Twain remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own -view of the "special vocation" of literature. What is to be noted now is -that the pilot was an exception, and the only exception in the -Mississippi region, to this general social law. In Nevada, in -California, where Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin -his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system described by Mr. -Croly reigned in its most extreme and uncompromising form; every one had -to be a jack-of-all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The -entire welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the -Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before the war, upon -the expert skill of the pilot; for the river traffic to be secure at -all, he alone, but he at least, had to be a craftsman, a specialist of -the very highest order. There were no signal-lights along the shore, we -are told; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars; the pilot -had to know every bank and dead tree and reef, every cut-off and -current, every depth of water, by day and by night, in the whole stretch -of twelve hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he had to -"smell danger in the dark and read the surface of the water as an open -page." Upon his mastery of that "supreme science," as it was called, -hung all the civilization of the river folk, their trade, their -intercourse with the great centers, everything that stirred them out of -the inevitable stagnation of an isolated village existence. The pilot -was, consequently, in every sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a -"sovereign." Not only did he receive commands from nobody but he was -authorized to resent even the merest suggestion. "I have seen a boy of -eighteen," Mark Twain tells us, "taking a great steamer serenely into -what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing -mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere." Pilots -were, he says, "treated with marked deference by all, officers and -servants and passengers," and he adds naïvely: "I think pilots were -about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, -embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes." Above all, -and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of -experience in American society, recurs with most significant emphasis, -the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that -highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole -condition without which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. -"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the -only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the -earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people -... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... writers of all kinds are -manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but -then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and -child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day -I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none."</p> - -<p>Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a -sort of channel for all the æsthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? -"When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent -ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a -steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were -only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and -material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: -repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for -a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can -hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, -to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating -enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean—first rate, for once! not -second, or third, or fourth—light and bright and gay, radiating a sort -of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, -its trim vigor. And what an air they had of <i>going</i> somewhere, of -<i>getting</i> somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit -of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! -Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of -mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And -the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any -menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and -their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the -fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great -master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that -of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural -passion of the novice lavished, for love of the <i>métier</i>, upon the only -creative—shall I say?—at least the only purposive figure in all his -experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the -Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It -was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. -"You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. -I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, -kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what -couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric -magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the -visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the -United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is -unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure æsthetic emotion, produced by a -supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said -in later life, when he used to assert so passionately that man is a mere -chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of -his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and -dictatorship of Circumstance.... Then Circumstance arrived with another -turning-point of my life—a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of -a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became -a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and -out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many -other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other assertion that to -be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts -had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and -respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct -to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited -an enthusiastic interest in craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a -neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;" -"he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required -intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those -printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, -therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the -training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark -Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted -to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to -submit to at any later period of his life.</p> - -<p>In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful -compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his -apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his -apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five -hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his -tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, -unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, -how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": -"even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," -says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament -could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is -to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a -career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, -initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum -all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, -"and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, -if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and -worship it! I want a man to—I want <i>you</i> to—take up a line of action, -and <i>follow</i> it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain -who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man -in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the -book, "I guess this is where our line starts"?</p> - -<p>Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that -shiftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for -dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of -his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, -if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, -meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of -existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing -with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to -have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I -used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things -got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can -trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and -another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, -who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing -down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. -Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the -life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to -study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. -Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books -and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots," -says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader—a student of history, -travels, literature, and the sciences—a young man whom it was an -education as well as an entertainment to know."</p> - -<p>Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life" -is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was—as -it is—an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you -were born to the task of performing a merry part in it—as though the -world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside -from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and -straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of -some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates -what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle -or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, -application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, -determined spirit."</p> - -<p>It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile sentiment: it is -the emotion of a man who feels himself in the center of the road of his -own destiny.</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></h4> - -<h3>THE GILDED AGE</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"The American democracy follows its ascending march, -uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as -the decrees of eternity."</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 75%; font-size: 0.8em;">GEORGE BANCROFT.</p></blockquote> - - -<p><br />You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, -feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim -labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an -artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent -nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp -schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted -with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in -fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in -fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, -for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river."</p> - -<p>Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him -for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as -the streets of London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia -served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will -it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great -writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound -personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the -mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread -in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind -with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits -of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, -he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has -his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circumstance -steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost.</p> - -<p>The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever -to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's -career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative -education, came to an abrupt end.</p> - -<p>Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change -instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to -him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that -exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in -the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that -he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a -military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The -whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with -which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it -does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility, -in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of -twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river -"sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and -purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that -amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and -there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on -the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had -thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and -'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark -Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the -characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile -frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over -his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was -fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a -little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become -organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would -never, in later years, have been led to assert so passionately that man -is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of -self-determination, was so new to this man who had passed his whole -adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent, -chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, -that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back -into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the -one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four -years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship: nothing -stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation.</p> - -<p>A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing -himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the -Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of -the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and -follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book -eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with -a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in -his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and -after these a pipe—an old, rank, delicious pipe—ham and eggs and -scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a -contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have -struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; -that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who -could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution -his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly -yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he -is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the -compulsions of his childhood.</p> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p>But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall -have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about -[the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was -Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance -now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of -his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself.</p> - -<p>What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the -midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties -and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the -beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an -indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the -war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, -as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when -presidents were business men and generals were business men and -preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the -American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of -the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was -virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career -of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was -certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested -public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. -Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he -was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his -Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole -field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I -fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest -field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, -by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his -epoch—in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his—we can -see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, -science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I -would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to -have accumulated—and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was -offered me—one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into -the tens and scores of millions—what is vulgarly known as 'money to -burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard—the -John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than -be Historian or General or President."</p> - -<p>Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have -offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that -of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one -channel passed all the religious fervor of the race.</p> - -<p>I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, -artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works -often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a -story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called -the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love -with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to -make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes -West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and -again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had -made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the -tunnel.... Perhaps some day—he felt it must be so some day—he would -strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it -then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to -him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was -all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he -persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or -four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I -<i>must</i> be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip -fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am -conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I -will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with -fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when -the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! -"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of -consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were -all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a -golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid -wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and -the Gilded Age is justified in its children.</p> - -<p>Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our -civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the -stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national -epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of -money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious -character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify -that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure -in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of -discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" -consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long -for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence -to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for -it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of -"another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the -mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious -zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in -the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor -of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are -repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has -become the prophet.</p> - -<p>We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to -Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit -of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration -of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and -Letters of John Hay":</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on -your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a -judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your -improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not -be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This -summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not -pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The -property you own—be it a tiny cottage or a palace—means so -much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up -whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an -attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization.</p></blockquote> - -<p>Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances -that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are -the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not -by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in -material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up" -with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, -of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and -most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that -can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the -history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, -and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of -letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the -will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he -was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers -and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the -imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, -therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence -upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own -normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal -culture—for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: -"Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor -and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with -occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the -bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth—here -one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality -of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything -was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in -his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very -disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be -acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and -notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be -tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he -not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, -and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, -debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what -is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, -for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the -other stars.</p> - -<p>We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we -realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War -were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought -were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, -in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity -of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the -West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success, -that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit -of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have -survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they -would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it -they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they -encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of -adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was -not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the -possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay -before some of them at least, that the mountains <i>were</i> full of gold and -the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up -some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great -rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a -race to come—that vision was ever in their minds. And since through -private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come—for the -group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American -nature—private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation -to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady -welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also -serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests -were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult.</p> - -<p>It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute homogeneity of -feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous folk before the Civil War and the -practical effect of pioneering and the business régime was to keep us -so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the -homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated -it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The -effect of business upon the individual has never been better described -than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I have known, and known -tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men—'big' financially—men -famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do -not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to -meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them -associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A -set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially -unattractive and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has -explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is -as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a -system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his -individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is -determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby -usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or -any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men -are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have -a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities -are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value -of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such -is the result of the business process, and the success of the process -required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually -automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality -significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has -drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the -collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the -collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than -the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere -assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is -called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality, -the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical, -realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly -says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the -man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact, -one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs -and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd.</p> - -<p>For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that -were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to -romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in -feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out -their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the -hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as -one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the -pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed? -Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform -dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an -anæsthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, -without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their -enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for -themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One -recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual -motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its -inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that -buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him -wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated -with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction -between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of -the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the -Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and -half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy -clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a -feudal castle, his wife is a châteleine, his children the baron's cubs, -and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the -broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable -blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the -promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of -his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him -the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the -material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason -and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of -reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these -illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the -story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim -Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to -whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends -used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green -plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums, -"California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one -eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had -to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting, -aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding -sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, -boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the -others a taste by and by—a withering, corroding sup—and they derided -him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, -and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the -luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the -romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same -over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names -as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that -made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious -pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to -"boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain -parts of the West.</p> - -<p>Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would -not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the -country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of -criticism, in fact, was regarded as <i>lèse-majesté</i> to the folk-spirit of -America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell -the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and -reputation. Who does not remember the story of Dickens's connection -with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil -Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less -attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an -agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and -defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded -as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no -intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong -emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad -and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was -regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was -obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of -actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, -becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant -than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge -Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' -Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll," -says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in -society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, -and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own -notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short, -entitled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary, -that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves -superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If -you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of -your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and -warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent.</p> - -<p>As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America -against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in -England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating -forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse -of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic -prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and -humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name -of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic -industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of -the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins -and the Morrises—in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly -untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar -destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the -state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of -1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While -the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined -place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and -fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, -and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed -that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism -they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were -the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to -victory—and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant."</p> - -<p>Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, -even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the -individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the -human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil -War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or -less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the -rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, -had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were -stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a -natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, -had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories.</p> - -<p>In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the -gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those -days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand <i>young</i> -men—not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, -muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and -royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and -magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of the world's glorious -ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans—none but -erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was -a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths -stayed at home—you never find that sort of people among pioneers." -Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature -itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and -calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of -the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order -to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening -space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not -to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the -future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who -were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the -towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of -story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the -life of this New England countryside during the generation that -followed—those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants -of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population -only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What -a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!—a -civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death. -Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation -as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those -manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the -generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole -spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a -neurotic anæmia in which it has remained so largely to this day.</p> - -<p>This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of -its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the -unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the -fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. -Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper -in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it -was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them -high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they -were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure -shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, -just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's -unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the -winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an -extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the -less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had -gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had -not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed -them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like -Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in -Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the -stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American -past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the -conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was -not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright -light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left -behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men -westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and -the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her -complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had -become the pacemaker in the arts.</p> - -<p>One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new -régime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England -that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to -carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien -editor of <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>, was consecrated to the high priesthood -by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, -already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly -appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a -young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he -resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life—an -incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his -prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own -unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America -anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. -His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an -essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his -superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed -him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative -reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all -masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured -point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate -any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his -position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what -Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, -from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and -submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and -formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide -the notion of the artist's rôle through which he had found his own -salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the -religious, moral and social taboos of the time.</p> - -<p>I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy -actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now -that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply -played into the hands of the business régime? The taboos of the one -supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of -both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring -as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, -disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the -fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled -Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who -possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what -necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that -drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during -the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against -the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, -that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry -Adams his novel, "Democracy."</p> - -<p>With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these -men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, -motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding -type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong -assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon -which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of -literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist -and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who -are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and -disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American -minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of -William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad -crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate -minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of -glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing -materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see -from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, -these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by -theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers -who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age -that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop -to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form.</p> - -<p>Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: -no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; -there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, -for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing -eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping -with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes -that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything -essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, -admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he -mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a -belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism -of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural -possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely -upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does -not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of -life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his -eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism -of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic -dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play -in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of -decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, -of inarticulate misery—read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of -the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other -nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or -next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would -have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch -without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing -upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna -of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, -moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain -hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had -forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the -welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's -"manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of -pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the -disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a -certain beautiful residuum of truth.</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></h4> - -<h3>IN THE CRUCIBLE</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"The American proposes to realize his individuality freely -and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and -free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly -consenting that some other person, better qualified or more -competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when -he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to -will."</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 60%;"><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">GUSTAVE RODRIGUES</span>: <i>The People of Action</i>.</p> -</blockquote> - - -<p><br />Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the -gold-fields of Nevada—the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one -that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded -Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the -woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about -a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good -time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a -child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him -out for destruction.</p> - -<p>Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confrères of -the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader—a student of -history, travels, literature and the sciences—a young man whom it was -an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says -Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, -indolent good fellow with a love of humor—with talent, perhaps—but as -one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a -certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from -the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of -barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and -dandy—in fancy percales and patent leathers—in white duck and striped -shirts—he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch -hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of -the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in -dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further -than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable -surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And -whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his -utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life -as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing -vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't -suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier -frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching -thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half -the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the -indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of -development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him -had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had -been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. -He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment.</p> - -<p>Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true -of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of -previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common -fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the -gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it -was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were -transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion -of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing -It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of -the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there -as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the -'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever -produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves -were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other -vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost -fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes -that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in -every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military -companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, -'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, -civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey -mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and -station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. -The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock -lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North -to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development."</p> - -<p>This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly -opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark -Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he -might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing -spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark -Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, -far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make -terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such -a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make -money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family—that old pledge was -fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his -failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own. -Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was -the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally -enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great -triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered -it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were -gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to -exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing -what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, -more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the -river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his -father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had -become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother -Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of -success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the -position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say, -compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not -fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for -him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine -once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make -good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also -become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his -Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look -upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or -revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man.</p> - -<p>What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself? -A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of -inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the -indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had -obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was -indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was -tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held -absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the -rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who -submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher -standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the -easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." -Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative -instinct, therefore—and he was anything but fully aware of them—he -could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his -craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to -acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of -sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy—all -those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct—were, from -the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely -in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken -down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the -tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in -them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his -own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly -organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of -torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe, -which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering -words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks -of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was -always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous -hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it -our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He -was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality -was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a -day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were -incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who -was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated -at first, he always yielded in the end.</p> - -<p>Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive -instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was -stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one -could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one -afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying -'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would -come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he -would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going -after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all -their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around -to tell me about it—and also to urge me to accept of the next -forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual -facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself -strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as -twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a -foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest -a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand -in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you -that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had -to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not -merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his -level best to become a millionaire.</p> - -<p>It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain -failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth -a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with -exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he -failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new -work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. -Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment—these were the -qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life -had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of -his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in -spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not -fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He -went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied -me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. -"The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, -"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their -movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and -suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom -humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are -likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the -flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense -anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other -extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up -everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his -comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to -the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to -bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a -critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed -simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to -succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and -yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly -anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark -Twain's business life.</p> - -<p>So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious -desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of -individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in -the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted -him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the -necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American -writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain -solved by becoming a humorist.</p> - -<p>Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's -soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more -than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of -his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he -would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off -"alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely -from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at -all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his -surroundings"—wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would -hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything -else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to -establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the -fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." -"He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner -who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a -camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!—all the -contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's -fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to -succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in -himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives -in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted -to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any -one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up -hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary -paper in Virginia City; hell!"</p> - -<p>Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary -pretensions called the <i>Enterprise</i>, which was edited and written by a -group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was -to the <i>Enterprise</i> that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and -at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he -presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with -profound reluctance.</p> - -<p>Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born -writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any -opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a -life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have -gravitated toward such people as the <i>Enterprise</i> group: that he did so -is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But -committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a -different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky -journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the -pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a -good time," says Mr. Paine. "The <i>Enterprise</i>, 'Comstock to the -backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain -could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself -with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, -as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" -says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as -a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he -fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when -"the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all -hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding -himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile -walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," -says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he -came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How -different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his -piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked -forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an -inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself -and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a -capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a -hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the <i>Enterprise</i> office worn and -travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard -leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about -one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he -added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It -was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to -claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is -something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that -suggests not an acclamation but a surrender?</p> - -<p>Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the -<i>Enterprise</i> Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He -attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to -me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to -break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the -surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." -No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more -or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on -the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was -relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune -that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were -plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him -reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself -so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to -excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, -and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this -opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must -consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but -the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the -creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but -actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the -<i>Enterprise</i> mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he -had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, -and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of -a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by -the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was -this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens -the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark -Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the <i>Enterprise</i> -was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate -that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, -the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if -he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would -prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any -other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For -him, therefore, the opportunity of the <i>Enterprise</i> meant an obligation -to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he -wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would -not have displayed such reluctance in joining the <i>Enterprise</i>, and the -fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a -humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling -his own soul.</p> - -<p>Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come -to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. -But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his -amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading -together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his -triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and -said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself—I am allowing -myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any -longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied -himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to -choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not -only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many -instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a rôle which he -apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate -all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it.</p> - -<p>But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. -Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer -rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the -mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new -title"—the pen-name he had adopted—"and its success." He knew that his -severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, -worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he -was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a -rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that -promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the -mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately -proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his -new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we -actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to -telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That -he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that -he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a -commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: -"His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," -says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not -with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was -necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a -good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the -<i>nom de plume</i> was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, -crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations -in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted -a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his -merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the -time—in pioneer circles, especially, observe—simply argues that all -the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a -form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own -persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting -coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe -water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in -Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought -of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which -he was proud only because it paid.</p> - -<p>It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he -had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone -astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was -intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was -desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the -evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been -here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We -are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find -with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again." -Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is -certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is -crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his -journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No—not -home again—in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The -city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business -anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had -become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had -been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a -loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the -trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New -York as he is about to start on the <i>Quaker City</i> excursion which is to -result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two -letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of -his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he -says: "I am wild with impatience to move—move—<i>move</i>!... Curse the -endless delays! They always kill me—they make me neglect every duty and -then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never -had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am -so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish -anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored -full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an -accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless -moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly -unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his -family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the -most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself -to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, -transgressed his principle of growth?</p> - -<p>One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in -New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it -was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in -the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. -Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while -for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a -lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought -disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus -Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it -as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he -believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written -January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what -to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up -and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save -piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be -excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single -out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!—"Jim Smiley and -His Jumping Frog"—a squib which would never have been written but to -please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed -that he had not even offered it to <i>The Californian</i>, the magazine to -which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard -it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter -prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he -has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other -hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for -it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, <i>then</i> I am done with literature and all other bosh—that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate -him, this poor, ingenuous being!—this divided soul who has never been -able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows -no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his -own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping -Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone -rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary -edifice."</p> - -<p>So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted -this rôle unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic -self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying -that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative -instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive -instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that -instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by -public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine, -"was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that -never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings -of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been -to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word—his nod, even, -constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler -calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order -to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak -child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal -life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his -companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled -in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular. -United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make -money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it -received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected, -repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb -and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest.</p> - -<p>Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights -of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets. -Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes -of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to -laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered -a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the -mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his -improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect." -He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a -bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The -Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some -degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute -accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the <i>Quaker City</i> he -found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry -Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to -follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second -book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and -intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides -this, it brought him the recognition of <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>. It -brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the -postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a -choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be -disposed to accept—"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a -Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's -appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It -brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, -assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London—mine being -(between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was -received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the -long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least -one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on -any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in -gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when -one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite -actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred -against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." -Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which -he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset -his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in -Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go -home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic -conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient -in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had -made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had -pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in -America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored -regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely -overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most.</p> - -<p>It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James -Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in -their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a -humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing -that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be -something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they -found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant -something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of -culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal -visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but -to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only -ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been -a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent -barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the -presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen -applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a -dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do -it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to -his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being -gulled, and partly because he wasn't—because the beautiful force of -his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, -because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, -are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with -slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was -not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was -being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, -by the people who really <i>knew</i>, whose judgment could really be trusted. -Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply -countersigning the verdict of America.</p> - -<p>For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain -men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have -seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation -into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment -when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business -agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about -this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But -the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America -played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over -to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward—these -must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a -diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was -not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything -less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all -their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made.</p> - -<p>It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus -Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada -world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are -told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps -with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too -could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's -counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit -with possibilities of inner growth before him—what could Artemus Ward -have known about such things?—but as an embryonic institution, so to -speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself -and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he -ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was -subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," -said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement -of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and -character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with -inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had -been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we -look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les -Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for -knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can -we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not -withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, -had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not -already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America -capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said -to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least -resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your -mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend—into life -and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and -"extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never -forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he -acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and -refined party" of the <i>Quaker City</i> excursion which led him to the feet -of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward -Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread -and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," -said he—Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now -here, you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to -deny that—but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than -enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do -it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him -how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his -percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in -the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were -the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men -of statecraft, literature and divinity.</p> - -<p>Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance -of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner -peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him -committed to the pursuit of worldly success.</p> - -<p>That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a -creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. -He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral -infantility. We know that the rôle of laugh-maker had, from early -adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in -Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers -laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud -and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, -where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his -audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, -he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in -public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had -returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held -so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That -persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to -a <i>métier</i> in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of -craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It -was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least -resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was -falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied -that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the -artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a -journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance.</p> - -<p>Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he -wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have -doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, -except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." -To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success -of his book—a success the like of which had scarcely been known in -America—Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a -journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and -editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the -rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer -with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that -Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's -fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest -point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had -temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now -again literature had dropped into the background, had become an -avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial -interests!—there were whole years during which he thought of hardly -anything else.</p> - -<p>This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, -with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic -attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to -"follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a -series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage -of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the -same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of -adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was -this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered -by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the -success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other -autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige -machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning -to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary -life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the -boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a -peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other -phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various rôles he has -played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or -education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I -ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that -under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the -reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really -experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all -different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the -artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an -infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he -tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and -again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There -was nothing new in that story"—"The American Claimant"—"but the -finger-prints in this one is virgin ground—absolutely <i>fresh</i>, and -mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied -a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded -to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public -wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with -what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"—the -possibilities of this, the possibilities of that—in the commercial, not -in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the -promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with -its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, -in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series -that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not -as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally -conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his -life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot -and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant -of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naïvely, -"but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a -thing as an artist had never existed.</p> - -<p>Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark -Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his -agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, -Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain -hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is -reputation anyway—money is secondary." So he floods the house with -complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he -says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune -didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and -your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the -country." It was true. But in that moment—that typical moment, in that -reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's -die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with -generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to -walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes -to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a -formidable spirit, that <i>alter ego</i> within him,—he is going to hear its -bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: -his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the -dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned -over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished -to secure a government appointment for Orion."</p> - -<p>Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable -sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says—with an emphasis of his -own—he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. -From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called -adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence -without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" -now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments."</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></h4> - -<h3>THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as -bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride."</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 65%;"><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">IBSEN</span>: <i>The Comedy of Love</i>.</p></blockquote> - - -<p><br />The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, -consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead -himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and -still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most -consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own -way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy -calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what -Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, -of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so -little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in -America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: -"in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious -things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to -practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon -one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the -bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. -No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of -industry.</p> - -<p>Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he -put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light -are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if -Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the -children of light he would have been perfectly free—to starve and to -shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its -moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he -could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the -recognized American game according to the recognized American rules.</p> - -<p>Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct -of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just -because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks -of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that -people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling -them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the -lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a -personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his -environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear -for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the -most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without -foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. -Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he -wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, -to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left -vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished -him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he -met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make -good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew -the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in -prestige, stood to him <i>in loco parentis</i>; and, to complete the ironic -circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a -Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them -he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. -Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody."</p> - -<p>The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later -years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we -are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser -Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit -heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions -that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the -will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus -Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what -they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret -Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently -until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to -a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in -the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above -all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first -moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary -affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature -and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean -Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The -Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the -woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom -with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual -rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by -his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the -self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go -his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always -been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve -it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S. -McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself.</p> - -<p>In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to -the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the -prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a -contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the -community to which money is the primary condition and the primary -instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew -Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged -to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the -spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an -expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a -young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued -now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And -meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social -inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish -manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness—everything that made -foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that -would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to -consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of -a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of -bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had -ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had -become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of -humor was a gold-mine—so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently -cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He -was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he -wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot -properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we -realize that he had been manÅ“uvered into the rôle of a candidate for -gentility.</p> - -<p>But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had -been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his -creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead -father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his -mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man, -in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take -precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been -the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the -days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he -was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go -back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure -as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained -precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time, -we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever—proud (even if somewhat, -critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had -been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, -scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In -turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the -same Sam, and always would be—a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true -that Mark Twain, <i>who</i> required authority as much as he required -affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who -would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be -mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at -least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and -afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the <i>Quaker -City</i> party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and -character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed -my buttons on," he wrote—he was thirty-two at the time—"kept my -clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), -lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only -natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife -"implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his -subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, -"she edited everything I wrote. And what is more—she not only edited my -works—she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the -totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia -Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death -Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her. -Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about -him?—"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was, -I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken -the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place. -Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara -Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the -billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."—a sign that was -always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been -called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used -to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him -straight—"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he -went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have -been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue -of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male.</p> - -<p>As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest -that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been -affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other -reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to -adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest -instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of -success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with -the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on -terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old -renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make -good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated -obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just -as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or -finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little -less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying -that, automatically, her gods had become his.</p> - -<p>It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations -between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere -of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even -of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is -regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English -criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, -Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family -and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village -ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At -bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic -analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is -of profound importance to society and because they know that what any -man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and -affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind -that all the best biographies even of our American worthies—Hamilton, -Franklin and Lincoln, for instance—have been written by Englishmen! No -one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society -has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, -therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited -his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, -whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his rôle as a realist and -carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her -heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest -has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and -that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations -and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist -and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of -European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New -Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as -creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. -Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, -she stepped immediately into a rôle far more truly influential than that -of any President.</p> - -<p>Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and -mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in -any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization -all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual -culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted -down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had -attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social -stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, -fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter -generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular -sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, -imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to -submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august -brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains -on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with -their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The -quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect -based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of -the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice -proclaimed them sacrosanct.</p> - -<p>We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a -presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place—a place -of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, -pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the -daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not -to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame -did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted -almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that -Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of -Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he -had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had -been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect -for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt -himself, the interloper then—he would not have been Carlyle but the -stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark -Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl -without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned -anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been -conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her -friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore—and love -compelled him to do that—he had to win the approval and the pride of -Elmira itself, he had to win the <i>imprimatur</i> of all that vast and -intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the -symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," -that "no one was good enough for her—certainly not this adventurous -soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark -Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy -upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in -order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in -California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his -character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the -"worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover -on his mettle?</p> - -<p>Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this -new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able -to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his -candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the -vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and -lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know, -"he had become suddenly a person of substance—an associate of men of -consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He -was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to -that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to -refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But -could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we -are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his -financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book," -he wrote, "unless there was <i>money</i> in it, and a good deal of it"; he -had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and -"conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were -almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent -and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his -marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already—the best possible -omen for one with his resources—$22,000 in debt! He had put his -shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even -faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so -manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being -equal—and his wife would see to that—he really was a safe, -conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon -capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain, -anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to -cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been -accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course -they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and -besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start -them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in -"The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal -that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, -whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all -significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author -adds, naïvely, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated -as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon -in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally -stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that -this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his -gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot -forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable -street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage -and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous <i>ménage</i>. -It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's -wedding day!—he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the -confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely -committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the -outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly -shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had -foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, -"lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper -enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the -ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the -ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged -it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound -himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that -Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo <i>Express.</i> -Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business -man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one.</p> - -<p>The full consequences of this moral surrender—shall we call it?—can -only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, -precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently -and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he -might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in -his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many -other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven -back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect <i>horror</i> and -heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the -bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I -cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I -suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you -would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have -wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems -to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who -was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His -bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. -"Farewell—a long farewell—to business!" he exclaimed during those -weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will <i>never</i> touch -it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I -will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as -follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good -and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer -up—don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has -been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. <i>Except</i> when I think of -you, dear heart—then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving -and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem -to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the -dirt—whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but -no dishonor—and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, -Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she -doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't -convince <i>me</i>!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary -of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before -all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, -who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her -husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind -in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. -She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and -all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in -the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to -retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very -ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he -was involved more and more deeply in it.</p> - -<p>As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation -as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should -adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that -he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the -matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had -promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was -laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed -his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical -type—at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete -invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to -sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her -back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, -to arise and walk—Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, -and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. -"I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark -Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first -child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal -absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his -wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I -am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, <i>then</i> I am -done with literature and all other bosh—that is, literature wherewith -to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What -chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the -pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find -his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never -possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new -life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are -valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are -admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that -private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime -interests of man.</p> - -<p>"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is -said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and -the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all -matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. -"Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of -supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for -the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a -little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely -going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had -been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; -but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and -purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his -personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she -set about it in the right way—gently, and with a tender gratitude in -each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward -the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, -indifferent attitude toward life—to her always so serious and sacred; -she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of -religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his -religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens -had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... -It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family -prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a -Bible chapter." Thus was reëstablished over him that old Calvinistic -spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a -child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what -fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious -man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, -for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," -says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly -with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with -the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the -proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had -long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she -prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness -to which he, the chivalrous Southerner—the born cavalier, in -reality—could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him -"Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in -keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could -never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only -accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he -gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her -"exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own -judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as -another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would -quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral."</p> - -<p>It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the -blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in -turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive -about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me -do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was -partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, -but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between -the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial -body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in -their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was -also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried -to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having -annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in -order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose -approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of -embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table -that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, -"and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was -almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the -guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells -after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells -bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than -we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last -moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send -her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more -for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for -mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, -after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had -privately suggested to you that we hadn't any <i>frames,</i> and that if you -wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was -simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How <i>could</i> -you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive -nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have -been intolerable to her that, at the <i>Atlantic</i> dinners, her husband, in -spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood -was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as -Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, -unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all -hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his -Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace -does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my -list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I -was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my -repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as -an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not -been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it -tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, -as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods.</p> - -<p>Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character -can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his -marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter -of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of -letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept -him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial -assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo <i>Express</i>; in return, -he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his -Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be -immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate -editorship of the Buffalo <i>Express</i> without a single word of comfort or -encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to -be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word -shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom -is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more -innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage -had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of -chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already -induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting -"parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal, -the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could -manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief -censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed -him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture, -meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please -Boston—impossible, terrifying task!—had become as obligatory upon Mark -Twain as to please Elmira.</p> - -<p>We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the -Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider -the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared -to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of -his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston -audience—4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and -he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in -a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a -charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells -was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the -nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the -latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her -husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled -them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter -of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a -court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him—to his -own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to -your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who -takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and -of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject -when Livy took charge of me ... and I may <i>still</i> be to the rest of the -world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no -doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been -enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as -an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own -self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in -behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no -comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were -themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges -of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's -neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It -seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an -old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great -embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder -that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do -about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats -and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In -this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility—provincial because it -was without a sense of proportion—were kept constantly before his mind -and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the -Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad -threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple -Delilah his wife.</p> - -<p>For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a -taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The -criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens -and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they -formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to -read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of -life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could -not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion -of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud, -under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible -and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive -ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, -was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold -novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language -for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at -work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so -greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather -discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all. -"Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs. -Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable -damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other -way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind -fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And -shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by -the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy -says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're -going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly -gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits -and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody -might have written but whose romantic mediævalism was equally -respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs. -Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have -been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." -Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural -genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such -subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if -we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in -these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of -"blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark -Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only -tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly -pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds: -"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He -persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet -acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to -friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so -little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this -mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, -precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to -live down.</p> - -<p>Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the rôle of critic and censor. A -memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over -the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her -task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word -would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty -often.</p> - -<p>But can't I get it in <i>any</i>where? You've knocked it out -every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, -good word.</p> - -<p>Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing -a slave boy.</p> - -<p>It's out, and my father is whitewashed.</p> - -<p>Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change -"breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. -I would take that and "offal" out of the language.</p> - -<p>You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy.</p></blockquote> - - - -<p>We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive -as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility -and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, -no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no -artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for -bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his -latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as -something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of -conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, -specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; -and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to -further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially -as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, -as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash -not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. -Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't -afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his -letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the -"swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the -thing Huck would say"—namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark -Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a -certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of -Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it -into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his -conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the -German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. -Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. -Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute -she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her -tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to -miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. -Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my -scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little -one-sided?"</p> - -<p>They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers -behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for -an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. -"Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party—in -Rome—he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one -wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. -Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, -you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, -regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've -been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these -tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an -ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. -Very humiliating, and also very tragic!</p> - -<p>Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western -life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to -win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, -seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant -word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of -liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess -that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" -was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that -grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to -formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, -free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, -he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins -themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And -in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all -the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, -instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the -genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature -and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to -seek.</p> - -<p>Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain -Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty -years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough -in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it -assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he -wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his -little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up -and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one -more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do -anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, -and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one -locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in -1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular -success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he -had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from -pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire—we know it as -much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his -own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious -to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of -corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was -here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid -before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: -'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere -magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself—publish it -first in England—ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some -of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There -was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of -the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark -Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe -in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! -The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was -to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great -leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child -who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to -smoke the pipe of truth.</p> - -<p>Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it -shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe -and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man—is it -remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, -happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, -the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game -as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns -an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life -is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, -as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five -on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week -day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss -wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, -on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a -will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from -responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of -creating standards of his own and living up to them?</p> - -<p>"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," -wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which -influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets -him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find -himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose -approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's -command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a -deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views -which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and -blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in -public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like -the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his -environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color—had -he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul?</p> - -<p>"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his -life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had -never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor -express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more -idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any -possibility have occurred to him to <i>resolve</i> to become brave. He <i>could -not originate the idea</i>—it had to come to him from the <i>outside</i>."</p> - -<p>The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of -Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic -plea in self-extenuation?</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></h4> - -<h3>EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole -capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he -cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping -friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what -one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. -This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ."</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 65%;"><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">IBSEN</span>: <i>Letter to Brandes</i>,1870.</p></blockquote> - - -<p><br />And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that -all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, -uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and -passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who -used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. -Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher -of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark -Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and -unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he -has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every -great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous -relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined -to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian -interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the -labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his -individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to -type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer -environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering -in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, -from the outset of his life, subjected itself!</p> - -<p>Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy -as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," -he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition -was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and -uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas -and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an -expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; -trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark -Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a -person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven -to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they -did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, -to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the -husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the -purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and -entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of -his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this -narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so -powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that -instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood.</p> - -<p>We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's -universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he -seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his -fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his -nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. -"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter—it had a -heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes -and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and -lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came -home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its -eloquent welcome—and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from -this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed -neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the -worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one -great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's -home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his -domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any -monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; -it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And -having accepted the rôle of the opulent householder, he threw into it as -much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going -to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses -were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up -to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," -"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, -according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to -increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at -hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for -explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those -who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand -that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, -mercenary view of things—but then my household expenses are something -almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent -considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of -living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for -some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, -not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel -Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the -visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently -extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was -living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses -amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In -the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could -furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and -highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural -taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, -would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those -early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his -"disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that -finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large -hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, -"he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and -delight of his guests. There were <i>always</i> guests; they were coming and -going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a -'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of -his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay -the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"—after a while he -virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer -months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his -mother—"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these -things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that -they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed -for the simpler life—above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit -cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more -ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the -child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she -found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy!</p> - -<p>To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the -public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the -beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large -consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of -adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up -in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of -the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have -remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and -become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing -need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a -professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a -waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt -requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of -casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a -postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use—not to mention -the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were -his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. -He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of -other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding -he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first -author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work—his -impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in -this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"—that he -had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had -been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can -add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and -one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see -one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact -that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to -which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to -the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the -following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of -marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a -spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises -amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is -not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two -hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained -of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had -to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no -choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he -had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of -his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one -month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to -redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for -a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries -of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred -million dollars.</p> - -<p>Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced -in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to -heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? -Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the -distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy -with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to -follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book -because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"—for this he -had, in fact, become—he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might -say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular -enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the -same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the -proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns -to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he -who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten -days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative -principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at -least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, -gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make -millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of -authors—he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the -country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, -"reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone -of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions -a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing -themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them -three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if -his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift -and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he -is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, -impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against -the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it -with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he -has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, -"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means -of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He -"liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was -pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger -to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of -his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of -the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him—"here I -am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt -gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that?</p> - -<p>For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had -adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, -position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation -of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe.</p> - -<p>He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more -oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the -trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What -were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of -Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General -Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the -"Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. -It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it -was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for -getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were -secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost -consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish -weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own -shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what -he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly -confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for -a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, -penurious, famishing for everything she sees—money, power, glory—vain, -untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, -immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most -interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is -quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of -Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing -figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration -of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because -of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his -faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he -admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, -is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race -prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of -imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American -business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever -held. It was not the old Germany that he admired—never that! It was -Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut -Yankee," had set out to make mediæval England a "going concern" could -hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that -phenomenon in all history.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view -of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European -letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the -appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are -told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his -family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a -distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of -the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be -ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated -by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a -feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity -student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he -told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the -deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to -us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew -him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and -circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find -him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely -imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was -carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters -to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged -in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything -on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the -cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it -was in his power and his fame.</p> - -<p>Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in -the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set -against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, -Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the -headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and -infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has -seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with -complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept -as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding -materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing -so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In -1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a -Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of -improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested -that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he -was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the -great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the -framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far -Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the -colors of the privileged class which the new industrial régime had -brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a -member.</p> - -<p>His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his -essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in -the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to -his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence -and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends -the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for -the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets -the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy -which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more -nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the -tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, -against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I -finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every -time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay -the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!—and not -a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy -of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish -to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, -"Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a -scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a -Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous -defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, -tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he -was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one -situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for -trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he -would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, -frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which -he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent -to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages -in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on -the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on -the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London -drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the -Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the -insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of -sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral -splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men -benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly -opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this -was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time -he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have -afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his -letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry -views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily -written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to -dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud -voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of -his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing -attendance on him!—how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not -hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly -have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the -principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic -victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one -situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate -the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; -and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his -dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an -article passionately advocating that the salaries of American -ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be -devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true -function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing -it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial -society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement.</p> - -<p>As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take -precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with -him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the -pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the -feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on -England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the -scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend -those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson -having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English -Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to -the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, -how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic -bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was -regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. -As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to -include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less -and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself -against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious -tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with -very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive -economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in -his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply -he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, -then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in -his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more -than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had -once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy -Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to -say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I -never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore -when he found me in deep water"—this man had given too many hostages to -the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant -self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel -of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the -Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for -in the world, the only man I would give a d—— for, the only man who is -lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a -Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book -or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find -him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other -Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into -his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint -Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut -Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch -whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to -accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was -Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself -over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he -who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in -a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy -Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there -recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his -Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of -Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated.</p> - -<p>So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed -reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty -liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the -American nation in the hollow of his hand—the nation, or rather the -epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or -trump—but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home -with his public—he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to -pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he -does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored -family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from -every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark -Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause -would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that -matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole -neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a -unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, -had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor.</p> - -<p>Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character -he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an -uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an -expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his -surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naïve worship -of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical -inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of -subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this -let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I -have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, -spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at -all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And -once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular rôle and had -forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the -pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards -of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he -had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a -reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years -and an ass for fifty-five."</p> - -<p>It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's -instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of -literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was -merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any -other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination -for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other -business man—to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make -money because other people made money and to make more money than other -people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother -Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, <i>then</i> I am done with literature and all other bosh—that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the -span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I -have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford -it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." -Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was -sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to -realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and -in the other that he had not lived it—for certainly his marriage had -not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public! -Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so -supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no -conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, -he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business -enterprise and of letters.</p> - -<p>"If Sam had got that pocket"—we remember the saying of his old -California comrade—"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of -his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent -of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he -have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes -happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and -perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its <i>débâcle</i>, Mark -Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to -stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, -"have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had -been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own -books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were -promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to -write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work -altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so -neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes -of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as -well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of -the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing -business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We -have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have -been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": -of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my -retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain -pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we -can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this -ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical -aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning -Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is -simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade -and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, -found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the -material rewards it brought him.</p> - -<p>How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point -of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those -middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised -men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to -the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the -hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. -Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the -literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's -cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how -Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a -personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the -word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as -against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic -of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the -Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain -disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the -Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to -mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her -husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as -nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the -illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was -identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his -brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting -Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion—At 12:20 this afternoon a -line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the -first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was -done <i>automatically</i>—instantly—perfectly. This is indeed the first -line of movable types that ever <i>was</i> perfectly spaced and perfectly -justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the -immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. -Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well—dizzy, -stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human -brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful -mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how -wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered -the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was -fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, -too far away—as even his financial interest was too shallow, after -all—to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable -mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, -of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark -Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a -piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of -the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of -the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations -in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he -called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations -are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets -who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's -seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such -people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had -witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and -innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age -for having produced Walt Whitman.</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></h4> - -<h3>THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"How can great minds be produced in a country where the test -of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?"</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 65%;"><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">JOHN STUART MILL</span>.</p></blockquote> - - -<p><br />We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in -Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America -indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we -recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to -the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every -influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of -opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the -real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling -Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which -had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real -Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained -rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a -child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this -childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual -independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work -as a writer.</p> - -<p>"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous -temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one -written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland -where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three -at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing -that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him -to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. -To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as -we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the -torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got -back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he -could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and -when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he -would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been -so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what -he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I -was the kind of person that <i>does</i> things. Does them and reflects -afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without -asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that -time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been -punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and -reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I -still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and -reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition -of immaturity.</p> - -<p>Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for -gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the -fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed -dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes -of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had -the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were -staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go -down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an -elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at -the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the -dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to -this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he -added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went -back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came -down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a -really royal stair—leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. -To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like -descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place -where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous -at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully -protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk -waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was -seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along -the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the -dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for -his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do -the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. -When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at -Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford -pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was -"planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient -Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would -have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or -rather still, Tom Sawyer?</p> - -<p>Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense -of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of -his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not -Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell -that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a -literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not -affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so -increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our -political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where -that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to -have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and -economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his -traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social -tendencies that had so spectacular a <i>dénouement</i> within four years of -his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the -century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's -funeral—"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, -"will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from -now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the -Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was -involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might -almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is -scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy -of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of -it—indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity -regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same -rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think -of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a -succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives -wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that -the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of -Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the -world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification -whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was -"entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political -history."</p> - -<p>And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark -Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. -Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of -sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, -political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would -expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for -example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It -requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious -little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the -communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade -every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the -sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? -Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most -conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly -unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all.</p> - -<p>And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped æsthetic -sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the -common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of -an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch -below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the -majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous -acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world -remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in -heaven":—"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to -have recognized the sign—the old, sure sign that has never failed me in -matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is -mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going -to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did -he like? In painting, Landseer—"and the way he makes animals absolute -flesh and blood—insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little -and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could -tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the -beginning—to my mind—their music made all other vocal music cheap; and -that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than -any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs -America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, -Kipling—"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are -told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a -sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained -his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that -Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the -fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar -Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of -doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbô," -which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was -wholly non-æsthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could -stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. -He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's -"Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have -taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of -all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight -in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and -Thanatopsianism—in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the -most primitive form of æsthetic emotion, combined with just those tints -of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are -characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence.</p> - -<p>Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the -mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his -lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic -self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose -extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes -gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of -letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, -the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of -greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his -own juvenility freely registered itself.</p> - -<p>"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very -remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, -"but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have -developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... -he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even."</p> - -<p>I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the -fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has -been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; -she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been -the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, -childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm -perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of -that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was -in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in -upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of -happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual -and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, -Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children -themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house -always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider -scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish -hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by -trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an -energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have -guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells -reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; -admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, -there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story -of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that -story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown -men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy -was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds -the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps -that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it.</p> - -<p>Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there -ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His -mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and -without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off -as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which -would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from -his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable -were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable -to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was -super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was -doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe.</p> - -<p>Unused, half-used, misused—was ever anything like that energy? Mr. -Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because -his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of -darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing -himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, -because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to -the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant -trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of -gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, -unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to -turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the -final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest -as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead -lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, -thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. -Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been -published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't -have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's -letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His -mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance -that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature -tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's -way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the -fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded -manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts -about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the -interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer -Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in -1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly -tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family -censor—"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a -dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn -Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which -Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death—how many others -were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, -loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in -his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions—how -like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of -authority!—was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast -flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk—was it garrulous, was it not -rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an -undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, -following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, -outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind?</p> - -<p>An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty—could there be a -surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all -this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon -who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two -supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his -writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has -monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art.</p> - -<p>Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits -of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is—where -shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can -write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; -"but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I -didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't -play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that -years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a -play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine -articles and books—and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this -a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a -talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of -letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from -attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but -the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and -well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had -interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those -months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He -appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he -found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of -beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true -even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he -was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the -Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd -contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the -publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know -how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." -This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the -composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, -impossible performance"—no doubt because he had been able to write the -whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only -by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He -wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing -and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing -it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but -incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was -probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more -ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession -of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was -he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in -defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was -the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold.</p> - -<p>In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we -observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden -desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot -master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to -interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of -sustained interest in his work—his lack of interest in literature -itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of -his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the -technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, -surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his -æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by -æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems -to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in -literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. -Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had -never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother -had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, -he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of -Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, -in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane -Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper—is not -that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here -again there was a positive note—his lifelong preoccupation with -grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas -by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly -verbal!—"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful -German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's -Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," -"General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation -in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells -that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for -saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some -imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling -women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward -the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be -infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are -all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his -first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I -suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in -the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with -letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of -"Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring -from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing -off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to -take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially -never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well?</p> - -<p>Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man -is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his -taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some -slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" -having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years -after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright -copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, -although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to -understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, -obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human -spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The -Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark -Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the -expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through -the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican—all the galleries.... We -examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, -Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we -didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar -stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We -fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor -and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its -pet feature—there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and -Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a -hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, -more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known -was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the -American people of his time were simply the English middle class -transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to -Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to -have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife -and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had -subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his -mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an -old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream -of the "land of Egypt"—Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at -all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European -tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. -His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of -the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry -and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of -Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with -these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which -had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all -the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage.</p> - -<p>How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine -speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to -construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate -personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief -gifts—transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater -at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are -indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation -in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process -of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of -them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in -design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or -historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," -"Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom -Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he -said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he -assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon -his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose -in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the -Mississippi"—and even there it is the river itself and not its human -nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in -Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of -American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never -become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over -that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed -to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his -characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has -sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only -characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded -Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, -he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and -what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: -unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he -says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined -sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the -book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not -attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail -how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in -passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is -perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been -transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. -He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in -consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even -to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of -his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos -of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: -consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear -of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his -imagination.</p> - -<p>We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit -with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the -artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of -influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas -are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's -imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except -for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his -own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own -spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without -development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins—a -fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": -"Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost -entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private -venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not -to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. -When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded -by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal -experience.</p> - -<p>Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage -that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson -Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he -had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had -come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It -was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should -write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he -set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and -stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": -we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down -the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, -because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in -nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never -used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems -hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to -write for the <i>Atlantic</i> and it is only then that fresh memories rise in -his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand -for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to -Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A -Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful -for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even -"Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not -spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the -story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in -him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in -another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells -to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written -for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and -slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to <i>The Atlantic</i>," says Mr. -Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and -before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to -work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of -it are condemned here and there and yonder."</p> - -<p>Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious -"laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary -sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at -the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on -authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that -to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but -what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose -luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, -especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in -bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy -comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that -indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to -spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no -doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his -matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether -useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too -seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent -assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, -and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign -that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of -those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with -all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a -boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a -journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the -goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low -that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged -him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the -capitalist régime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of -reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system -in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare -himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was -predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 -of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very -last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide -repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: -'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one -imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But -who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from -a lazy line?</p> - -<p>It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can -explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was -subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take -notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make -speeches." That innocent <i>réclame</i> of his, that irresistible passion for -the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to -have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his -inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart -had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For -court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living -that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done -worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four -months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on -the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one -of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was -dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into -which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed -into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been -able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that -rôle the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" -he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to -be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." -And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that -he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing -quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the -truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent -youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them -into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of -being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of -his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who -certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a -passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the -last man gave out from sheer exhaustion."</p> - -<p>For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his -work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an -increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly -have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We -remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the <i>Quaker -City</i> excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically -meaningless to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless that it -seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in -my mind as a pleasant memory.... An accusing conscience gives me peace -only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it -but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by -the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to -penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the -change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the -Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from -"art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and -duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the -first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier, -"before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river -itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his -task explaining, in that connection, the difference between -"theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just -so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more -so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the -'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has -become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that -descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an -absolutely certain financial success—how repellant it became to him as -time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the -self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell -that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't -have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, -and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and -propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down -went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he -had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief? -"The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to -finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A -Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it. -He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted -child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a -charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the -moment in the approval of his wife.</p> - -<p>We have seen—and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his -arrested development—that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for -literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What -is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in -his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think—over-expressed -it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so—in something he wrote once -of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as -we say, more than for aught else whatever—cared for them with that kind -of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond -votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a -refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect -freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark -Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My -right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write -this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it—no, I mean 1,000,000—next -fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't -have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have -been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost -cynical indifference, of insolence even.</p> - -<p>Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a -significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the -creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, -"his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on -his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far -behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and -it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his -best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his -judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and -certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can -take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything -but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with -such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object -in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had -approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the -craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how -exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!—"possibly the book may -not sell, but that is nothing—it was written for love." But more -striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven -times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of -preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation -and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously -exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in -that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully. -What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for -"Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he -had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own -fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular -pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them -anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from -the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious -ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of -indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey -of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve -years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his -delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine, -the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying—that spirit which -came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly -gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which -tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the -dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a <i>réchauffé</i> for children, -for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no -doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely -treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the -book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never -known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains -in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship.</p> - -<p>If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine -the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same -time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive -stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession, -have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think -of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was, -says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw.... -On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably -would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence -due?—"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all -but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with -all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent, -prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in -one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get -a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his -"laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform, -and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought -always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice -of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have -said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in -fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his -essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the -<i>raconteur</i> of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is -just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of -mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of -the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a -boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land -because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him -reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had -remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To -tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper -places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at -last—oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control, -to spring that final effect of horror!—there was something worthy of a -man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in -his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable -through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and -training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age -of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, -to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had -Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential -authority, with that old negro <i>raconteur</i>, that old pilot of the -Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark -Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his -best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, -the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as -often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had -expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at -least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at -least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: -in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring -masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and -thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass -muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the -others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, -inherited folk-skill—he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist -ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his -<i>métier</i>, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever -more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going -his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. -Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual -consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had -remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural -genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with -which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he -found open before him.</p> - -<p>It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life -should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it -now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and -why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The -autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on -hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because -they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore, -that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it -is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either -internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until -it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open -and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary -number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the -surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which -is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the -American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial -success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse, -characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find -him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an -absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885, -at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained -his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you -can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had -"assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he -had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was -the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually -recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote <i>con -amore</i> were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not -only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something -in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he -was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men—that was the -public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business -men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the -phrase, "children of a larger growth"?</p> - -<p>Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he -seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" -could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly -"Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. -But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom -Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he -associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a -publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" -and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic -consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its -real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, -all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious -Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, -though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. -Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is -clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys -through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its -bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de -Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with -love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this -happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says -that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best -book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown -in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to -a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it -on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One -might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a -hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays -which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of -the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift -stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering -itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books -alone—these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering -on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the -ground.</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII</a></h4> - -<h3>THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters."</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 20%;"><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">ALEXANDER HARVEY</span>.</p> -</blockquote> - - -<p><br />At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going -through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of -men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a -certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you -would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, -however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is -only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the -guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack -and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact -this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the -imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the -trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another -self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you -perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has -become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in -the twinkling of an eye.</p> - -<p>So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no <i>real</i> morals," he wrote in one -of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and -preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." -Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality -of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but -upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial -morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, -as we have seen, had conformed to a moral régime in which the -profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been -submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the -respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to -depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the -explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self -had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had -concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct -of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that -instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and -manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never -having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to -air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were -black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning -Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant -blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on -it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the -conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it.</p> - -<p>First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he -was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social -régime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious -self urged him to maintain these values and this régime. His unconscious -self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him -in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his -story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the -famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, -he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse -races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with -his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi -diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his -best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two -incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the -symbol of Mark Twain himself.</p> - -<p>Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged -on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was -always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the -floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by -apprehensions—badgered, harassed"—and let us add Mr. Paine's -adjectives—"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset," -till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent -the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he -always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his -will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant, -fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental -desire pointed him just the other way?</p> - -<p>Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had -submerged himself in the rôle of the husband, the father, the neighbor, -the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His -absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development -of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain -was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house -was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own -drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent -caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the -householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one -observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting -against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being -"bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and -tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and -wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." -Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or -getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results -too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain -became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only -just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, -he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so -extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which -developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one -of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and -the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with -her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have -been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not -qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone -who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose -myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which -the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other -caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old -Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic -protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. -Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's -constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found -in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely -inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. -We can see from this that although his conscious life had been -overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, -his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature.</p> - -<p>And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of -Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that -"heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations -like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists -mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate, -that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of -Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness -and priggishness of his own <i>entourage</i>? I should go even further, I -should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark -Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had -regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially; -Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for -gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written -to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted -classic until you have been dead one hundred years—it is the fate of -the Shakespeares of all genuine professions—but then your books will be -as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the -encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; -but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of -fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language. -But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's -literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he -"detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written -by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored -them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have -despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste -was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a -par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his -wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had -accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his -unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to -please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything -about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's -criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude -of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious -self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how -strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself -directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its -teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated -bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic -aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the -repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend -Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, -and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a -companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he -roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried -self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a -prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model.</p> - -<p>We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious -observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when -the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked -on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies -behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were -together on a lecture tour?—"You will never, never know, never divine, -guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made -until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has -taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and -troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke -of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." -His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for -Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," -he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them—they have found a -hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in -fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. -White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar -books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors—after -Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot—were Pepys, Suetonius and -Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, -and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the -cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such -passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely -"spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is -Man?"—"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. -For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I -ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other -difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when -at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: -"Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as -unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men—and concealed, -kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (<i>and -could not bear</i>) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not -I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no -other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which -his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for -Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually -praising their "unrestrained frankness."</p> - -<p>And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of -parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark -Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he -wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. -Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over -Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he -would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold -fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism -was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been -permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to -ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. -Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the -time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the -English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and -assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could -not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the -riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he -poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity—the waste of -a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at -a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity -among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, -has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard -one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that -are current in every New York publishing house?</p> - -<p>In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful -ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through -the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the -unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait -for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the -<i>outré</i>, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia -Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark -Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon -upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and -they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and -thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it -from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily -search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and -oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in -order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they -were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort -of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the -texture of Mark Twain's writings.</p> - -<p>For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through -with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In -the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. -In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been -prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or -by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship -which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some -contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, -are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In -such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully -satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"—a -compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two -railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms -of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud -has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any -reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we -are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious -bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those -embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that -express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies -wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon -which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or -rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this -process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, -certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am -writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some -manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On -these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be -straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." -When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead -Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was -frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote -his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about -himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia -of his soul.</p> - -<p>Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, -for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the -first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is -proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the -book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American -Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he -wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. -Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly -expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to -be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that -never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion -mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself -once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in -short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed -were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that -sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such -times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all -sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits -of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible -animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort -on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a -propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved -abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to -literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in -the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally -been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian -monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant -farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce -to a tragedy while I was going along with it—a most embarrassing -circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but -two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed -the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. -That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed -further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it -stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of -passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry -satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, -that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far -relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the -battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our -very eyes.</p> - -<p>Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of -"wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is -surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the -celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward -J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the -Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they -made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the -celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this -Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him.</p> - -<p>Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate -of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is -the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by -the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note -the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the -unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is -a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu -of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.</p> - -<p>This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead -Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with -Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an -author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that -Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he -continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply -another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the -same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been -privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement—a calendar, -with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; -appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and -fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful -of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But -irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for -it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided -without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson -was a pudd'nhead—which there hadn't—this revelation removed that doubt -for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him -before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius—a -genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed -here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets -generally get at home—for here they don't give shucks for his -scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory—hey, Dave, ain't -it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired -Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it -possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was -picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? -Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures -Pudd'nhead out-manÅ“uvring the village folk and triumphing over them -in the end.</p> - -<p>Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame -and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more -or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says -Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally -and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were -never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. -For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of -self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and -that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one -but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole -community—of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by -leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield -and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted -incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens," -the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all -those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his -true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and -admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it—it was -these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon -him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who -took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their -hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a -deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in -the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the -misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, -the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to -recognize its divinity?</p> - -<p>Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the -"wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the -desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself -in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the -suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells -about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"—saying that it gives a body -"a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, -far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate—and Lord, no -chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale -of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of -a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old -castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into -subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation -for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that. -As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American -Claimant"—so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age," -who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after -one of his uncles—every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his -own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful -claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those -fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him—isn't he the obscure -projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business -life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet -forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true -rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark -Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to -account for his constant preoccupation with this idea.</p> - -<p>Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his -old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that -flitted through his mind—Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and -fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have -been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in -himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese -Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the -usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle -perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and -"The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that constitutes "The Prince -and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the rôle of the -beggar-boy—Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn -himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the -Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically -slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of -incompatibles bound together in one flesh—the Extraordinary Twins, the -"good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad" -boy of whom society disapproves—how many of Mark Twain's stories and -anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!—does he -not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history -of his life?</p> - -<p>We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was -expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become -owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the -poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American -progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," -the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the -discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more -wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been -discussing, however, we can see that while the censorship had been -sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his -unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to -cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his -saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like -Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant," -thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where -"prosperity and position constitute rank." Here, as in the malevolent, -Mephistophelian "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we -perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save -his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained -fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his -finger-print invention—otherwise he would find something better to do -than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how -could you expect a young English snob to know anything about democracy? -That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his -readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would -know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the -great American game of bluff they would have to forgive <i>him</i>! As long -as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short, -he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the -public in the hollow of his hand, knew it.</p> - -<p>It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand -the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn." -Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little -boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let -himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the -writing and the fate of this book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to -have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the -publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain! -Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pass the -censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an -irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this -world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization. -That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity -we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting -to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons -attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to -find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he -can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive! -Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness -are so many shields behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of -the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his -unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical -passages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the -mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by -the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has -the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: -"There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The -withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the -sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in -his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism -in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have -appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the -lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial -detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation. -"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," -says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable -on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!—that raft and that -river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole -unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds -and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of -the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"? -Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was -not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright, -shining arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is -because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that -gave it its momentum.</p> - -<p>Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was -intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the rôle of a demiurge, in -fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and -misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for -this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed! -Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs, -petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the -domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those -second parents who had taken the place of his first—we have to thank -it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and -general revolt of Huckleberry Finn:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; -it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The -widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them -ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every -morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; -she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them -blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem -to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten -nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around -anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar door for—well, it -'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and -sweat—I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in -there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The -widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits -up by a bell—everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't -stand it."</p> - -<p>"Well, everybody does that way, Huck."</p> - -<p>"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I -can't <i>stand</i> it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub -comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that -way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in -a-swimming—dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. -Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort—I'd got -to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to -git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder -wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she -wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before -folks.... I <i>had</i> to shove, Tom—I just had to.... Now -these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I -ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...."</p></blockquote> - -<p>This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see -what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back.</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX</a></h4> - -<h3>MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is -nobler and less trouble."</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 30%;"><i>Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.</i></p></blockquote> - - -<p><br />And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant -Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he -was in revolt against a rôle which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust -upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc" -anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark -Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous -writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other -than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, -we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic -development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this -career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that -found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his -decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious -and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige -had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark -Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and -what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and -at the same time achieved such ample material rewards.</p> - -<p>It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we -have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; -and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency -who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a -humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he -was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of -Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. -Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, -sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of -chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous -cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society -required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems -to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a -distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition—the -battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it -seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, -when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is -the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind -it."</p> - -<p>Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark -Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that -in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found -that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his -diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do <i>hate</i> to go -back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from -mining. "We fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada -as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman -say, the other day, that it was the 'd——dest country under the -sun'—and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never -rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green -thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the -purest—most unadulterated and uncompromising—<i>sand</i>." And as with the -setting—so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, -"the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on -him": more than once he found it necessary—this young man of -twenty-eight—"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat -Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs -and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." -That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own -testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d——n San Francisco style -of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made -his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands—"God, what a contrast with -California and the Washoe"!—ever sweet and blessed in his memory. -Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was -this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also -call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which -also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of -his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he -was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was -always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill -his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr. -Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic -waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of -the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam -swear."—Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was -living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation.</p> - -<p>Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of -pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life. -It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with -domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that -sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as -we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was, -nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or -satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were -civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom -civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable -avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which -their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, -they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were -blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, -that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children -were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how -hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining -population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex -tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single -monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which -kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse -in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually -impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept -a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to -conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask -of a rough good-fellowship that found expression mainly in the nervously -and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the -gambling-hell. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which -peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, -quick-moving, strong-handed young giants—the very pick and choice of -the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing -It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or -decrepit—or shot or stabbed in street affrays—or dead of disappointed -hopes and broken hearts—all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon -the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof -of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed.</p> - -<p>Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that -life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the -fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The -gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an -outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of -masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the -intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the -human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering -one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps -the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was -almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the -day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so -common—that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the -newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his -old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated -duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of -chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser -degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the -pioneers?</p> - -<p>But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that -individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and -preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering -itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but, -victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not -withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from -openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already -pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers -in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were -always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in -calling a relief from restraint.</p> - -<p>We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were -subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the -most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most -complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances -where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most -general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was -the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a -life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the -necessity of making money, of succeeding—the same impulse had brought -him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain -was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from -attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised -and because to have done so would have required just those expressions -of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other -hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of -all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those -outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his -companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never -"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged -physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. -"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty -years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have -lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still -retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that -would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out -into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in -the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his -instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had -to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a -life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he -became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of -individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship of public -opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada.</p> - -<p>Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some -kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, -since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, -had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the -artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, -far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark -Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in -order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he -acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his -individuality—his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, -his constant desire for privacy—that struck his comrades as "different" -or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how -urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society -where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself -by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his -profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing -at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see -from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of -his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was -always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his -humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men -laughed when they could no longer swear"—as the expression, in short, -of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief -in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those -acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of -consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious -jokes—and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will -hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically—he -could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those -conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this -vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time -keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming -his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a -relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose -investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, -the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of -expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic -effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke -or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely -safer, too!—a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist -in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of -those jokes of his—("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of -one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than -the editors had spoken each of the other")—his comrades were able, -without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own -exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred -and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship -that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain -himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to -maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the -position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader.</p> - -<p>For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular -ferocity. The very titles of his Western I sketches reveal their general -character: "The Dutch Nick Massacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing -Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Cæsar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in -the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his -labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the -doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the -phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to -kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead -Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape -hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It -began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a -special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; -but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was -"unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, -the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, -in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt -officials—we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own -painfully honest brother Orion—were frankly afraid of him. "He was very -far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any -way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even -from trying to be a humorist!</p> - -<p>Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik -Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, -found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all -that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down -upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not -enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man -with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same -way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own -childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of -Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged -by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his -antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of -satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest -of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in -him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his -pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated -and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike -he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is -the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in -corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of -things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not -seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was -an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, -their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change -things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a -counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very -moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive -instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to -express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have -led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an -end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as -human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired -Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it—a relief -they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could -not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been -compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He -had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a -campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine -says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As -a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote -criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the -result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco -papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a -correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we -are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long -restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the -"humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in -California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from -expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in -short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to -remain a humorist.</p> - -<p>In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover -the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who -found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter -of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no -value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same -trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." -Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he -had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps -we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor -consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't -know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as -surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists -of a sort who lack the courage to admit it.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I -say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to -carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of <i>The Galaxy,</i> to -which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct -a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" -his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a -humorous work—that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have -already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the -pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the -rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business -men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. -The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for -ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national -demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by -Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at -last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact.</p> - -<p>I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the -Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of -Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly -homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we -have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile -because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or -restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us -feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile <i>because</i>! -In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The -"cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all -his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and -as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far -from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in -these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and -even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark -Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches -in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, -lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small -harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances -of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; -but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, -all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the -same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than -the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's -humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the -same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is -to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" -that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us -from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to -murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from -the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us -to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a -phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the -last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is -the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the -demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he -made upon his environment, had become, <i>pari passu</i>, progressively more -stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as -barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why -perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment -favorable for a régime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who -has risen," the typical American, himself a business man?</p> - -<p>Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of -succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but -complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the -stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general -"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been -characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation -was practically organized—by a sort of common consent—on the plan of -a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed -to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and æsthetic -development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised -the success of the business régime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark -Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to -the efficiency of this business régime, because it helped to maintain -the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as -it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the -Western pioneer.</p> - -<p>As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business -man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the -"strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an -aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he -find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way -and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an -aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, -diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the -creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic -coöperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts -for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that -expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." -Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional -freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a -retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: -consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, -confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On -the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, -everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, -reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and -responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual -and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor -does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought—and -especially irreverent toward them!—when they gave him a seat below the -salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and -absurd everything of a spiritual, æsthetic and intellectual nature the -recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the -smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as -we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at -antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an -infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being. -That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a -hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the -spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, -involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader -to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional -stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all -these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure -in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much -as the pioneer.</p> - -<p>Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether -they corroborate this argument.</p> - -<p>In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself -seated directly behind a young girl:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she -would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own -thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer -pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy -dreams,—no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit -still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of -a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young -figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the -gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, -tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy -cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy -rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and -so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did -mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red -lips parted, and out leaped her thought,—and with such a -guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just <i>know</i> -I've got five hundred fleas on me!"</p></blockquote> - -<p>This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its -tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all -the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them -so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in -hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, -prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting -into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a -pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by -a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself -evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no -longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a -butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in -the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to -his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions.</p> - -<p>Another example, the famous "Å“sophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph -of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story":</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The -lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, -hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge -provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that -have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; -the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow -flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep -of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous -flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty -sky a solitary Å“sophagus slept upon motionless wing; -everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of -God.</p></blockquote> - -<p>We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury -of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its -various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most -careless reader will accept the Å“sophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's -sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation -of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and -thus divert the reader's feeling for it.</p> - -<p>To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life -of the man with an eye single to the main chance—that, one would almost -say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one -of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house -down in order to roast his pig—he destroys, that is to say, an entire -complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single -sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are -manifestations of just that personal, æsthetic or moral distinction -which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish. -Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on -General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous -assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the -human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of -the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success -of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the -final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a -democratic régime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition -of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the -fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a -business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is, -however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious -schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," -says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather -hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him -into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark -Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that -in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for -this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook -his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To -exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our -humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from -any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be -abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" -was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of -beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd -pioneer business man.</p> - -<p>How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The -Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological -moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of -industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become -obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it -was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe! -Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's -own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything -of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were -ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be -ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual -development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that -would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too -costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not -only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate -pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as -Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and -all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind -were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, -yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was -notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial -philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in -civilization, of modern America. "I find your people—your best people, -I suppose they are—very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant—only -talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's -novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there -seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in -their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of -the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of -cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The -Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's "Leaves of -Grass," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one -hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Grass," -having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its -whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that -is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the -individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a -commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true -spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring -every traveling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure of -its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so -far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and -the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far -as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing -satisfaction of Americans with a banker's paradise in which, as long as -it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled.</p> - -<p>So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. I -think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought -him. And are we not already in a position to see why the rôle of -humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, -why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own -development?</p> - -<p>Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of -the artist. It meant the suppression of his æsthetic desires, the -degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How -can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end -becoming the victim of his own habit?</p> - -<p>I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved -the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and -delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love -for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for -charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the -Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish -knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands -on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing -something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business -man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation -of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he -continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more -advanced æsthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one -of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the -irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: -one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually -"taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty -becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of -art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven." -In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions -of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. -Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective -coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by -stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself -a scarred child.</p> - -<p>He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day -come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal -humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was -satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great -purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of -which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was -he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he -lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the -"sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his -proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of -moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual -position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating -stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the -indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the -energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became -but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his -"high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by -saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as -fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of -harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that -world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked -everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an -endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that -equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out -of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can -appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after -all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief -life-saver."</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X</a></h4> - -<h3>LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN</h3> - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence -of ladies."</p> - -<p style="margin-left: 25%;"><i>A Double-Barrelled Detective Story</i>.</p></blockquote> - -<p><br />"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your -works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political -tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain -himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant -intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle which he was, if one may say -so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. -Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with -Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, -Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, -that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him -thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that -extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance -of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the -wish for the deed?</p> - -<p>What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds -up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the -inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is -Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the -obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up to the measure -on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, -intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the -intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism -of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is -embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely -conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain -cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he -did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government -his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly -speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and -government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil -community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view -of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes -for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the -fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? -Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social -life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of -our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own -humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the -support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities -and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw -bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else -begin."</p> - -<p>It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be -sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his -nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, -despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, -he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand -for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so -involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he -could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his -friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to -him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen -that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great -impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even -feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the -wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead -of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and -even flattered it.</p> - -<p>If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to -be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the -puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author -of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of -sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to -divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his -generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric -clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled -away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. -But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are -beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in -assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills -out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been.</p> - -<p>When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small -change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty -aspects of the tribal morality of America—Sabbath-breaking, the taboos -of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see -that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he -says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity -toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct -without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing -from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his -father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's -a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He -delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms -as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after -to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who -is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as -impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at -night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One -was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't -say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was -interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle -Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and -it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of -interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the -continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages -indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior -cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the -satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can -substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has -abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark -Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his -instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, -political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in -private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave -conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made -progress—the first progress in 'ages and ages'—colossal progress. In -what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which -add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But -the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The -materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that -there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was -before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is -a vast change (due to them) in ideals—do you admire it? All Europe and -all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme -ideal—all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations -named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the -world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This -lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, -dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of -Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that -he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the -great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, -that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his -friends were the unconscious agents of the business régime, bent upon -deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have -seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering?</p> - -<p>Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was -perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed -into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what -did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country -some of these days when the lazy <i>canaille</i> get organized. They are the -spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich -writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark -Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary -confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the -financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path -of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a -brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read -'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a -cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked -on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those -days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 -or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, -excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to -eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry -Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by -the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great -centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. -If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have -been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested -for his first important book—"The New Pilgrim's Progress"—was regarded -in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing -Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only -when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed -to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but -loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same -gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: -it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose -"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is -obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to -attack them?</p> - -<p>His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it -is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," -that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the -frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a -sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the -readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he -could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky -note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, -that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of -the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" -lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the -case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not -noticing these little spots on the American sun?</p> - -<p>In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems -frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen -that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief -embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been -the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of -speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are -all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and -generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and -politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there -are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed -out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly -animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact -the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand -old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its -devasting irony about every American institution save family -life—Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education -and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's -final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet -the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth -lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain -number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to -redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so—for the story -was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford—by -making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up -young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the -softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, -for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had -the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? -"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but -had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He -welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint -authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a -return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; -Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the -sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one -might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the -West.</p> - -<p>Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an -accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was -too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this -earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg"—not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever -again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of -industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great -Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as -"a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we -know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had -once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, -"that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too -often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that -having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels -backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he -feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the -seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth -century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century -France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The -Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again -the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a -contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the -"Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark -Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King -Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on -corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he -not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who -are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's -biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, -begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form -that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to -estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, -in his private memoranda—"do right and you will be conspicuous."</p> - -<p>Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's -intention and failure in his predestined rôle, the "Connecticut Yankee" -itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the -most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. -Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in -writing it.</p> - -<p>What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he -says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for -America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their -sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to -me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good -intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level -of manhood in turn."</p> - -<p>No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have -blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of -him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. -Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating -gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always -have been slightly irritating—he was irritating even at home, and how -much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to -dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw -red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon -General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, -an attack upon America <i>and</i> upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark -Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book -as the publisher of General Grant, upon his <i>amour-propre</i> as the -countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like -a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a -typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're -another!"—just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul -Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to -put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis -and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of -the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a -frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could -not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities -like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't -tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all -that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered -both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole -English race, indeed, to come and knock them off.</p> - -<p>Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a -satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in -the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, -unconsciously, into a sort of <i>bouleversement</i> of all his actual -personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds -himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up -the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher -level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but -to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In -short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to -do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee -mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours -ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of -the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were -sufficiently ridiculous already—England and the Middle Ages.</p> - -<p>Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's -genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did -not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle -years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his -letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was -absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can -see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH—A -Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old -Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and -Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to -Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and -thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear -date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)—and I give you my -word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there -was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I -to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; -there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this -progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of -Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that -he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he -proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to -those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something -rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a -land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being -possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up -to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the -inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average -rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous -wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the -seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about -that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected -from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it -might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of -space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he -calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there -is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace—<i>the approval of -his neighbors and the public</i>. And perhaps there is something which he -dreads more than he dreads pain—the <i>disapproval</i> of his neighbors and -the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the -disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their -approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous -letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by -deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only -wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in -even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated -classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always -hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to -instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can -get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to -"pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its -objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles -of simple folk! They are the most successful of all.</p> - -<p>The ironical part of this story—for it is worth pursuing—is that Mark -Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection -and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he -records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here -if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. -Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its -institutions"—its institutions, observe—"its fair rural aspects, he -had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; -against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so -admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons -for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed -him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first -English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many -of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English -readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark -Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class -of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that -Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful -heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? -But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, -as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid -its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their -hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, -merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately -desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have -already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of -this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was -this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely -personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in -reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark -that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was -his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public -figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, -in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his -responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of -humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with -him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was -measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without -hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like -the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people -immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the -situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford -neighbors, who had taken him into <i>their</i> hearts and homes?—that was -the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could -not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned -enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize—he was -boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to -satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize -not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won.</p> - -<p>Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine -tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was -badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was -highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the -"Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business -with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author, -we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the -publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be -popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have -been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the -top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the -exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial -pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make -King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?— -"Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck -and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest -field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the -English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting -the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the -great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks -neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he -wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain -had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the -spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the -magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, -less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also.</p> - -<p>"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it." -Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that -remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable -only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long -deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom -Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be -read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find -him adding: "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." Tell the truth or trump—but get the -trick!</p> - -<p>Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal -processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, -that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success -and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two -letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who -was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive -feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, -as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings -and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable -way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for -his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody -contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, -Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to <i>mail</i> this letter; he understands -that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no -harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a -volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his -crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he -would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one -writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a -very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot -embers in it here and there."</p> - -<p>Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask -himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he -accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the -priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the -accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and -cannot employ it.</p> - -<p>Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark -Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he -finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to -dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. -To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the -premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the -most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, -that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would -have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been -arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>To <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">COLONEL HARVEY</span>.—I am still a cripple, otherwise I should -be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those -illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, -obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the -Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war -into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all -respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I -taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to -modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. -<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">MARK</span>.</p> - -<p><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">DEAR COLONEL</span>—No, this is a love-feast; when you call a -lodge of sorrow send for me. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">MARK</span>.</p></blockquote> - -<p>And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that -he announced he was going to show it to the Czar:</p> - -<blockquote> - -<p>To <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">COLONEL HARVEY</span>.—I am still a cripple, otherwise I should -be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the -illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing -but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war -with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty -centuries history will not get done admiring these men who -attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved -it. <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">MARK TWAIN</span>.</p></blockquote> - -<p>Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful -fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To -Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' -stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had -told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. -'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up -and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. -'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men -can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' -He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he -was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions -and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! -And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in -this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment -to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible -playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars -up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to -support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation."</p> - -<p>Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain -was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes -to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far -more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was -always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to -America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his -aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him -a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious -wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into -the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir -in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position -carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders -to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal -ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, -was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of -reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who -appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. -"The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more -intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the -affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and -punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure -punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a -cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts -which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all -respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I -think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, -boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect -upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or -Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an -assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of -"brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most -pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer.</p> - -<p>This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the -Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who -attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other -hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what -everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society -Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but -monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who -took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in -actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it -appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, -as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the -nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, -the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could -not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the -spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, -for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the -spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was -personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. -Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to -print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion -behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was -the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents -Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by -disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered -the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own -genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a -whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold -quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding.</p> - -<p>Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old -age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared -to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's -biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled -satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an -impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those -merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance -upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him -to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer -interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his -childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; -he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of -his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he -imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. -He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought -in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, -"needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have -done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we -see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and -Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. -Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he -never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The -religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he -meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't -he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those -theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes -about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from -his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his -environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think -of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make -people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with -infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to -curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes -in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, -in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells -Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs -and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. -2006—which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment -of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," -saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so -far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs -one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the -trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the -publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered -life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had -found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth -and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The -absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous -conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's -pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven -is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote -in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he -dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a -single feature in it that he <i>actually values</i>. It consists—utterly -and entirely—of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on -the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do -not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are -singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about -two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in -a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not -many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have -variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you -have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented -a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is -like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too -rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the -tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, -in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent -impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of -"Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, -something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the -civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the -illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what -civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in -his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a -world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen -it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, -"until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating -sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut -Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, -and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted -nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim -of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of -life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol -promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that -is pathology.</p> - -<p>Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was -always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he -oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture -of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification -or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the -satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an -ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, -never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also -that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the -works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 -Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. -Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a -man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and -looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a -billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it -with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might -say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect -it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have -the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the -picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is -able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple -contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never -completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they -invariably led into this <i>cul-de-sac</i>. If life is really futile, then -writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make -life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility -is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it -might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it <i>is</i> -full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present -sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never -attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in -the air.</p> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - -<h4><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI</a></h4> - -<h3>MUSTERED OUT</h3> - - -<blockquote> - -<p><br />"... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the -others were all still asleep." <span style="font-size: 0.8em;">DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI</span>.</p></blockquote> - - -<p><br />And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly -liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him -and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his -defeat.</p> - -<p>"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday -speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe -no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a -time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your -term, well or less well, and you are mustered out."</p> - -<p>What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon -his life?</p> - -<p>"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," -"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived -in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the -public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we -print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries -and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot -had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once -and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the -creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and -he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write -frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of -Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you -ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose -opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic -naïveté of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought -or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential -priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross -and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, -immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt -contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your -immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined -to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found -out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is -true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence -of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so -doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity—to whom old age, far -from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering -forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of -youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; -you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of -the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain -thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out."</p> - -<p>His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy -years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and -awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have -oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon -your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck -Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with -Aunt Polly—that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in -this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has -become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, -unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant -growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in -matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of -national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches -now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played -this rôle in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the -clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain -perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": -the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world -as he had had—and they were great in their way—showed him how absurd -it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly -fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous -nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the -more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the -vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon -the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of -the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)—any -one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general -spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who -said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize -that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for -the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient -earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything -essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was -always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of -thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three -times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a -watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the -farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the -gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own -career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the -sort of courage he described in his story "Luck."</p> - -<p>"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so -little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak -out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he -continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same -seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor -(privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my -conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. -There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal -to that one." It was his "Bible"—"What Is Man?"—which, as he had said -some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will -not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did -he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise -we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not -rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long -habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double -personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to -redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and -comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had -kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not -sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had -kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of -the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old -imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long -deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How -it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a -little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark -Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the -truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week -he found that he no longer had the strength.</p> - -<p>Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to -Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing -for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and -have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance -to write a book without reserves—a book which should take account of no -one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, -illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my -heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I -judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is -under way, now, and it <i>is</i> a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book -was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing -it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his -desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil -upon the passion that possessed him. At once this craving reasserted -itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?" -He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his -friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he -felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire -still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind -on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a -mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path -out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he -writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden -emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous, -however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into -later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men -in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him": -there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth -now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth—anything that it would -hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored -the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother -Orion to write an autobiography that would spare nobody's feelings and -would let all the cats out of the bag: "Simply tell your story to -yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing," he -had told him. Let Orion do it! we can almost hear him whispering to -himself; and Orion had done it. "It wrung my heart," wrote Mr. Howells -of that astounding manuscript, "and I felt haggard after I had finished -it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had -found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was -himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as -Mr. Paine tells us, "a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even -his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down." To write such -a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed -what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for -autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"—for -confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to -redeem himself. "Writing for print!"—he speaks of that as of something -unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who -spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in -the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of -himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and -plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be -mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom," -he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, -"because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with -theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; -you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm -and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's -indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells, -who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really -indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast -advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against -the sluice-gates of a human soul?</p> - -<p>At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to -be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his -autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he -has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter—the passage is to -be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my -seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six -hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published -in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish -and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall -continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It -is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some -folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons -mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is -something awful."</p> - -<p>You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has -been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a -debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things -about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to -shock his wife. His wife—perhaps he is even going to be realistic about -her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three -"playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but -still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and -Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright -campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in -Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to -exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of -humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the -use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain -universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human -soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that -whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and -space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are -so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your -pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the -mightiest of all the centuries"—what a humbug it was, so full of -cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going -to have—what magnificently wicked fun!</p> - -<p>You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own -redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book -it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And -what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy -occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are -going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were -published before he died in the <i>North American Review</i>. They were -carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in -reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it -in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the -courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his -soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among -the diffuse and superficial impressions of the <i>North American Review</i> -gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been -dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have -thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I -am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on -paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired -when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I -should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike -them out when I came to revise this book."</p> - -<p>Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark -Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge -Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be -a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the -person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture -to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved -himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what -inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral -slavery, was a sense—how can we doubt it?—a half-unconscious sense -that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to -communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is -Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the -writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will -in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was -incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors. -There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, -if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of -founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at -Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market -value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; -but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was -not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without -the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his. -"It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is -nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys, -in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the -fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had -a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to -publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge -of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually -shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably -have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was -received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, <i>exposé</i> of -philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just, -that very generous public verdict—for the book is, in fact, quite -worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain—he must have -felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular rôle of a -Mephistopheles.</p> - -<p>With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the -repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that -civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen -from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference -and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported -by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm -heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and -oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of -the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable -corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in -South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; -Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the -Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering -the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark -Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of -the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive, -the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of -all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore -this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and -weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it -was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone -aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic -attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following -the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his -book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and -"A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against -bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him. -Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his -"Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the -forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit. -Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who -have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the -sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark -Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, -equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juarès and the -volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of -a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level, -and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his -animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and -despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself.</p> - -<p>The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his -energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or -another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly -destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a -will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my -feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on -paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become -definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his -great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can -doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks! -Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he -not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department -on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, -when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, -when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible -passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle -pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day -and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not -a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I -have been thinking it out—if I live two years more I will put an end -to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says? -Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human -race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was -it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for -means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian -Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy -frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack -upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the -failure in himself.</p> - -<p>And this failure was the failure of the artist in him.</p> - -<p>Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy -in 1878: "I wish I <i>could</i> give those sharp satires on European life -which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire -except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I <i>hate</i> travel, -and I <i>hate</i> hotels, and I <i>hate</i> the opera, and I <i>hate</i> the old -masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with -anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it -and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I -have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to -do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort -would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what -had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious -sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The -Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime -creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator -of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an -impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born -artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist -destroying art—there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in -the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious -he is, even this early, of all æsthetic pretensions! What a fierce -grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the -perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle, -he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all -Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of -tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the -peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a -low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark -Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; -he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is -the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to -desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp -unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously -desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, -why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to -produce only one himself, and that a failure.</p> - -<p>We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative -life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates -nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a -machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the -animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he -said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say -nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of -the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is -astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a -retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could -have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind. -But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging -his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off -the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in -the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults -him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in -Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle -expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to -believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon -knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer—see what Macaulay says! Macaulay, -heaven bless us all!—therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark -Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry -Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the -sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who -asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training -makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce -that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written. -But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel -Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had -not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can -hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to -follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession -revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on -faith.</p> - -<p>How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of -his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently -that it was "like the sky—you can't break through anywhere." How much -it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an -irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to -do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in -Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius -is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its -eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior -circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, -upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his -intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"—large, for -the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe -with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and -unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no -outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no -outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a -valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would -have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced -something—something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, -associations and training. In France he would have produced something -better—something up to the highest limit of the French influences and -training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to -Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is -enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we -can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking -reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his -half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as -"large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age.</p> - -<p>Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that -we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order -to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, -destroy us, we embrace them with an <i>amor fati</i>, to escape from the -contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave -who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, -finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the -possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself. -The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly -temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, -nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep -emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it -honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the -slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and -thirst for freedom.</p> - -<p>Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential -force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in -Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that -fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If -the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in -fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for -greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued -against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will: -he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a -will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose -regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no -spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where -success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is -a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place -of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the -first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be -weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that -Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it -is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How -well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain! -"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human -being is under training. It is his human environment which influences -his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his -road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself -shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval -he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the -way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the -tragedy of it.</p> - -<p>Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark -Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human -mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine -anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a -single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind -from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind -carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which -act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All -day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and -without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 -thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before -his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain -cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as -the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and -controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental -machine "racing along from subject to subject—a drifting panorama of -ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any -help from me—why, it would take me two hours to merely name the -multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen -minutes." The mind?—man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases. -It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite -of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely -independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better -have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark -Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, -chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks -and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't -listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and -wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of -personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, -that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in -these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with -each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book -regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch -inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal -conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the -end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul!</p> - -<p>The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary -psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance. -And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express -through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I -generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not -those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these -"three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me -at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in -the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life -that has been unfolded in these pages.</p> - -<p>"There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being -in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a -living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about -those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought -that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I -am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell -whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.</p> - -<p>"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to -the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am -always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be -funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only -making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they -commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing -there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house."</p> - -<p>I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas -that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark -Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to -think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought -of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow," -the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself -inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second -dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing -self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream -worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always -"trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has -lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great -surrender.</p> - -<p>Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment -when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda -packet:</p> - -<p>"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber—one of a play in which -the title-rôle of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of -this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The -other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon -him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at -me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out -of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't -want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always -expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'"</p> - -<p>No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have -had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; -but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for -good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess -alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity -of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said -Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks -and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have -ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born -artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that -he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be -"original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship -even over his neckties—the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, -has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily!</p> - -<p>And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about -on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most -ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, -the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by -all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic -sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the -end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an -illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the -creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those -three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of -conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is -the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own -conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He -was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that -has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for -missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says -John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, -"who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of -things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the -end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability -begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new -turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces -of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confrères -have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask -yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and -walk the stage as poets do.</p> - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42225-h.htm or 42225-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/2/2/42225/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: The Ordeal of Mark Twain - -Author: Van Wyck Brooks - -Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42225] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - - - - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - -BY - -VAN WYCK BROOKS - - -"_Think it over, dear B--! A man's gifts are_ -_not a property: they are a duty."_ - ---IBSEN'S _Letters_ - - -1922 - -LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN - - - - -TO E.S.B. - - - - -CONTENTS - - - - I. INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - II. THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - III. THE GILDED AGE - IV. IN THE CRUCIBLE - V. THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - VI. EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - VII. THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - VIII. THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - IX. MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - X. LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - XI. MUSTERED OUT - - - - -THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN - - - - -CHAPTER I - -INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR - - - "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the - deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the - race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and - for the same reason."--_Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's - books._ - - -To those who are interested in American life and letters there has been -no question of greater significance, during the last few years, than the -pessimism of Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his own -friends and contemporaries were rather inclined to make light of his -oft-expressed belief that man is the meanest of the animals and life a -tragic mistake. - -For some time before his death Mark Twain had appeared before the public -in the role less of a laughing philosopher than of a somewhat gloomy -prophet of modern civilization. But he was old and he had suffered many -misfortunes and the progress of society is not a matter for any one to -be very jubilant about: to be gloomy about the world is a sort of -prerogative of those who have lived long and thought much. The public -that had grown old with him could hardly, therefore, accept at its face -value a point of view that seemed to be contradicted by so many of the -facts of Mark Twain's life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him -intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of -his "pose" regarding "the damned human race," and we know the opinion of -his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was "not a pessimist in his -heart, but only by premeditation." These views were apparently borne out -by his own testimony. "My temperament," he wrote, shortly after the -death of his daughter Jean, "has never allowed my spirits to remain -depressed long at a time." That he remained active and buoyant to the -end was, in fact, for his associates, sufficient evidence that his -philosophical despair was only an anomaly, which had no organic part in -the structure of his life. - -Was it not natural that they should feel thus about him, those -contemporaries of his, so few of whom had seen his later writings and -all the tell-tale private memoranda which Mr. Paine has lately given to -the world? What a charmed life was Mark Twain's, after all! To be able -to hold an immense nation in the hollow of one's hand, to be able to -pour out into millions of sympathetic ears, with calm confidence, as -into the ears of a faithful friend, all the private griefs and intimate -humors of a lifetime, to be called "the King" by those one loves, to be -so much more than a king in reality that every attack of gout one has is -"good for a column" in the newspapers and every phrase one utters -girdles the world in twenty minutes, to be addressed as "the Messiah of -a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents"--what -more could Tom Sawyer, at least, have wished than that? And Mark Twain's -fame was not merely one of sentiment. If the public heart was moved by -everything that concerned him,--an illness in his household, a new -campaign against political corruption, a change of residence, and he was -deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won -the world's pity when he got into debt and the world's praise when he -got out of it, he was no sort of nine days' wonder; his country had made -him its "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in -appointing himself, as he said, "ambassador-at-large of the United -States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all -official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over "The -Innocents Abroad" and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices -to the day when the newspapers were freely proposing that he ought to -have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the -Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first -time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and -private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and -his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his -opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a -sort of incarnation of the character and quality of modern America. -"Everywhere he moved," says Mr. Paine, "a world revolved about him." In -London, in Vienna, his apartments were a court, and traffic rules were -modified to let him pass in the street. A charmed life, surely, when we -consider, in addition to this public acclaim, the tidal waves of wealth -that flowed in upon him again and again, the intense happiness of his -family relations, and the splendid recognition of those fellow-members -of his craft whose word to him was final--Kipling, who "loved to think -of the great and godlike Clemens," and Brander Matthews, who freely -compared him with the greatest writers of history, and Bernard Shaw, who -announced that America had produced just two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe -and Mark Twain. Finally, there was Mr. Howells, "the recognized critical -Court of Last Resort in this country," as he called him. Did not Mr. -Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: "Your foundations -are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, -and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"? - -The spectators of this drama could hardly have been expected to take -the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously, and all the more because he -totally refuted the old and popular notion that humorists are always -melancholy. I have already quoted the remark he made about his -temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life, four months -before his own death. It is borne out by all the evidence of all his -years. He was certainly not one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue -natures, those June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day -long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He was an August nature, -given to sudden storms and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with -electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, -and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he -was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child -in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter -where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope -preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine -temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," -he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this -footstool who is more thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly _happy_ -than I am I defy the world to produce him and _prove_ him." And it seems -always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in his triumphs on the -platform or indulging his "rainbow-hued impulses" on paper, we see him -again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he was -expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress assembled, -"happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in -his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: -"Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know -my temperament"? - -And his physical health was just what one might expect from this, from -his immense vitality. He was subject to bronchial colds and he had -intermittent attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his health -appears to have been as perfect as his energy was inexhaustible. "I have -been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years," he writes -in 1875; from all one gathers he might have made the same statement -twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at fifty, at -sixty, at seventy--during that extraordinary period, well within the -memory of people who are still young, when he had solved his financial -difficulties by going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine says, -"like a debutante in her first season,"--the days when people called him -"the Belle of New York": "By half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had -danced all those people down--and yet was not tired, merely breathless. -I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at -work on this letter to you." And again, the next year, his sixtieth -year, when he had been playing billiards with H.H. Rogers, until Rogers -looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you ever get tired?": "I was -able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like. Don't you -remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the -villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I -get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one -daylight nap since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testimony -of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, during the last five -years of his life when, even at seventy-four, he was still playing -billiards "9 hours a day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human -being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a -young man, and by no means an invalid; but many a time, far in the -night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh -and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment of beginning. He -smoked and smoked continually, and followed the endless track around the -billiard-table with the light step of youth. At 3 or 4 o'clock in the -morning he would urge just one more game, and would taunt me for my -weariness. I can truthfully testify that never until the last year of -his life did he willingly lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least -suggestion of fatigue." - -Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his intimates, had ever -in their eyes,--this darling of all the gods. No wonder they were -inclined to take his view of "the damned human race" as rather a -whimsical pose; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it so even -if they had known, generally known, that he had a way of referring in -private to "God's most elegant invention" as not only "damned" but also -"mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are always supposed to be -that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about -the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an -abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to -explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its -stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and -Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment." -All his closest friends were accustomed to little notes like this: "I -have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing -that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and -hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put -in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race." -Might not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that? - -Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's writings which only a -succeeding generation can really have, it might be possible to explain -in this objective way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism -which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The change in tone -between the poetry of the first half of "Life on the Mississippi" and -the dull notation of the latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp -Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," -with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," -that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, -along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the -reader for taking his text at its face value--all this might be -attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and -family sorrow. If he was always manifesting, in word and deed, his deep -belief that life is inevitably a process of deterioration,--well, did -not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it not, is it not, a -popular American dogma that "the baddest children are better than the -goodest men"? A race of people who feel this way could not have thought -there was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims like these: - - If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he - will not bite you. This is the principal difference between - a dog and a man. - - It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to - hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other - to get the news to you. - -They could hardly have been surprised at the bitter, yes, even the -vindictive, mockery of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," at Mark -Twain's definition of man as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted -neither "to supply the coffee nor turn the crank," at his recurring -"plan" to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the -air for a period of two minutes. - -Has not the American public, with its invincible habit of "turning -hell's back-yard into a playground," gone so far even as to discount -"The Mysterious Stranger," that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole -of cruel nonsense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank -assertion that slavery, hypocrisy and cowardice are the eternal destiny -of man? Professor Stuart P. Sherman, who likes to defend the views of -thirty years ago and sometimes seems to forget that all traditions are -not of equal validity, says of this book that it "lets one into a -temperament and character of more gravity, complexity and interest than -the surfaces indicated." But having made this discovery, for he is -openly surprised, Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and -unexpected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had known before: "What -Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in monarchies, -aristocracies, tribal religions and--minorities bent on mischief, and -making a bludgeon of the malleable many." And, after all, he says, "the -wicked world visited by the mysterious stranger is sixteenth century -Austria--not these States." But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in -reality Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through -whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations of Huck Finn and Tom -Sawyer, those characters which, as we know from a hundred evidences, -haunted Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any rate, Mark -Twain's boys, and whoever compares their moral attitude with that of the -boys of Mark Twain's prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into -his soul. "We boys wanted to warn them"--Marget and Ursula, against the -danger that was gathering about them--"but we backed down when it came -to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor -brave enough to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get us into trouble." What, is this Mark Twain speaking, the -creator of Huck and Tom, who gladly broke every law of the tribe to -protect and rescue Nigger Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly enough nor -brave enough" to do a generous action when there was a chance that it -could get them into trouble? Can we, in the light of this, continue to -say that Mark Twain's pessimism was due to anything so external as the -hatred of tyranny, and a sixteenth century Austrian tyranny at that? Is -it not perfectly plain that that deep contempt for man, the -"coffee-mill," a contempt that has spread now even to the boy-nature of -which Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have had some -far more personal root, must have sprung from some far more intimate -chagrin? One goes back to the long series of "Pudd'nhead" maxims, not -the bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to bear no -relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist: - - Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead. - - All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange - complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to - live. - - Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all - his others--his last breath. - -And that paragraph about the death of his daughter, so utterly -inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes to himself: "My life is a -bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most -precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor ---death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to -life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; -and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions, to -one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that: but at least one of -them is that, not to the writer's apprehension, but in the writer's -experience, life has been in some special way a vain affliction. - -Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of Mark Twain's -pessimism? Can we attribute it, with Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt -under which he labored now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the -death of those he loved? No, for these things would have modified his -temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, -checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of -brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own -testimony, the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever knew, he -lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of life he had neither more -nor less than other men, and they affected him neither more nor less. To -say anything else would be to contradict the whole record of his -personality. - -No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted Mark Twain, a -malady common to many Americans, perhaps, if we are to judge from that -excessive interest in therapeutics which he shared with so many millions -of his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark Twain's later -history which has received too little attention. "Whether it was -copyright legislation, the latest invention, or a new empiric practice," -says Mr. Paine--to approach this subject on its broadest side--"he -rarely failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that would -provide physical or mental easement for his species." And here again the -general leads to the particular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender -heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts -of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he -and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near -losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in -their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that -momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor -Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method -that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles -about it, bombarding his friends with letters of appreciation and -recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave -most of his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea for all -human ills which osteopathy could not reach." There was Christian -Science to which, in spite of his attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat -equivocal book he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and -as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest converts," who -"never lost faith in its power." And lastly, there was the "eclectic -therapeutic doctrine" which he himself put together piecemeal from all -the others, to the final riddance of _materia medica_. - -We have seen what Mark Twain's apparent health was. Can we say that this -therapeutic obsession was due to the illnesses of his family, which -were, indeed, unending? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant -stimulus to the obsession--the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine," for -instance, did, quite definitely, rise up out of the midst of them. But -it is plain that there had to be an element of "soul-cure" in these -various healings for Mark Twain to be interested in them, that what -interested him in them _was_ the "soul-cure," the "mind-cure." Can he -say too much in praise of Christian Science for its "healing of the -spirit," its gift of "buoyant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from -care"? In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental healing -began at a time when he and his family alike were free from illness. It -is in 1886, when Mark Twain was at the very, summit of his fame, when he -was the most successful publisher in the world, when he was at work on -his most ambitious book, when he was "frightened," as he said, at the -proportions of his prosperity, when his household was aglow with -happiness and well-being, that his daughter Susy notes in her diary: -"Papa has been very much interested of late in the 'mind-cure' theory." -It might be added that he was about at the age when, according to his -famous aphorism, a man who does not become a pessimist knows too little -about life. - -In fact, the more one scans the later pages of Mark Twain's history the -more one is forced to the conclusion that there was something gravely -amiss with his inner life. There was that frequently noted fear of -solitude, that dread of being alone with himself which made him, for -example, beg for just one more game of billiards at 4 o'clock in the -morning. There were those "daily self-eludings" that led him to slay his -own conscience in one of the most ferocious of his humorous tales. That -conscience of his--what was it? Why do so many of his jokes turn upon an -affectation, let us say, of moral cowardice in himself? How does it -happen that when he reads "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him "with -force" is Tito's compromise with his conscience? Why those continual -fits of remorse, those fantastic self-accusations in which he charged -himself, we are told, with having filled Mrs. Clemens's life with -privations, in which he made himself responsible first for the death of -his younger brother and later for that of his daughter Susy, writing to -his wife, according to Mr. Paine, that he was "wholly and solely -responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality -his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-fall, the -separation from Susy, and this final, incredible disaster"? Was there -any reason why, humorously or otherwise, he should have spoken of -himself as a liar, why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of -writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I went on now and took -him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in -literature, and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"? -That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made him come to think -of literature as primarily, perhaps, the confession of sins--was there -anything in the moral point of view of his generation to justify it, in -this greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business, this zealous -reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be -cheaply persuadable" was, he said, the first command the Deity ever -issued to a human being on this planet, the only command Adam would -never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin of one of his -books: "What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep -and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he -despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same reason." - -A strange enigma! "You observe," wrote Mark Twain once, almost at the -beginning of his career, "that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt." That -spirit remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The restless -movement of his life, those continual journeys to Bermuda, where "the -deep peace and quiet of the country sink into one's body and bones and -give his conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an -autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible," which -would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt -alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense -relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of -limitations--you have served your term, well or less well, and you are -mustered out"--how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? -For Mark Twain was right--things do not happen by chance, and the -psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain -respects that other sort of determinism in which he so almost -fanatically believed. There is no figure for the human being like the -ship, he sometimes said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his -contemporaries, just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory -of that last English welcome, the _Begum_ of Bengal, stateliest of -Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it -merely an irony of circumstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of -storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea? - -No, there was a reason for Mark Twain's pessimism, a reason for that -chagrin, that fear of solitude, that tortured conscience, those -fantastic self-accusations, that indubitable self-contempt. It is an -established fact, if I am not mistaken, that these morbid feelings of -sin, which have no evident cause, are the result of having transgressed -some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one's nature. It is as old as -Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest -that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his -was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative life, a balked -personality, an arrested development of which he was himself almost -wholly unaware, but which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The -spirit of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from the -bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had never quite been -able to possess. - -Does this seem too rash a hypothesis? It is, I know, the general -impression that Mark Twain quite fully effectuated himself as a writer. -Mr. Howells called him the "Lincoln of our literature," Professor -William Lyon Phelps describes him as one of the supreme novelists of the -world, Professor Brander Matthews compares him with Cervantes, and -Bernard Shaw said to him once: "I am persuaded that the future historian -of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French -historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." These were views -current in Mark Twain's lifetime, and similar views are common enough -to-day. "Mark Twain," says Professor Archibald Henderson, "enjoys the -unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening -and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual -powers from the beginning to the end." To Mr. John Macy, author of what -is, on the whole, the most discerning book that has been written on our -literature, he is "a powerful, original thinker." And finally, Mr. H.L. -Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There -was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof -engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one -associates with the great artists of the Renaissance." An imposing array -of affirmations, surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few -years, during which he has become in a way so much more interesting, -have witnessed a singular change in Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly -present he is in the public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort -of archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not -continue so to be for many generations to comet Undoubtedly. By whom, -however, with the exception of two or three of his books, is he read? -Mr. Paine, I know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this day in -America in larger quantity than any other book of travel. But a number -of explanations might be given for this, as for any other mob -phenomenon, none of which has anything to do with literary fame in the -proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by the delight and -stimulus which he gives to mature spirits in the present, and time, it -seems to me, tends to bear out the assertion of Henry James that Mark -Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry Finn," -"Tom Sawyer," a story or two like "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a -sketch or two like "Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of -"Life on the Mississippi,"--these, in any case, can already be said to -have "survived" all his other work. And are these writings, however -beautiful and important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic -genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes? -Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that prevails to-day when he -called their author the "divine amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" -and "Tom Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent, as -complete works of art they are of quite inferior quality." - -So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not -been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled -almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him? When -his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cervantes, they -were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they -had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a -creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy, his -prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that "great, burly fancy" of -his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique -magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot -help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American -writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like -Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if -intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth -to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his -associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian -would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the -horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of -one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what -Mr. Howells says: "Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities -that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final -personality was something exquisite." That combination of barbaric force -and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him--is there not -about it something portentous, something that suggests the true lord of -life? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic -atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were -the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their -impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one -of the fixed stars had fallen in space. - -This was the force, this the energy which, through Mark Twain's pen, -found such inadequate expression. He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a -"divine amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called -it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way -of saying, in the latter case, that his was a mind that had not -developed, and in the former, that his was a splendid genius which had -never found itself? - -It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own self-estimate. His -judgments were, as Mr. Paine says, "always unsafe": strictly speaking, -he never knew what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the -time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against -his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark -Twain's estimate of himself it is no conscious judgment of his career -one has in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the judgment of his -unconscious self. This he revealed unawares in all sorts of ways. - -There were times when he seemed to share the complacent confidence of so -many others in his immortal fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his -large, loose, easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live a -couple of thousand years, without any effort, and would then take a -fresh start and live the rest of the time." And Mr. Paine says that as -early as October, 1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers a -contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the expiration of one -hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with -his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this -must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty -confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain -was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he -did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of -megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest -rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous -episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I -wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, -I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American -writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident -in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it became a -historic event: it was for him, plainly, of an exceptional significance, -and all his love for gorgeous trappings could never account for the -delight he had in that doctor's gown--"I would dress that way all the -time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine--which became for him a permanent -robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain at seventy-two, one of the most -celebrated men in the world, could not have cared so much for it if it -had been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must have served -in some way also to vindicate him in his own eyes; he seized upon it as -a sort of talisman, as a reassurance from what he considered the highest -court of culture, that he really was one of the elect. - -Yes, that naive passion for the limelight, for "walking with kings" and -hobnobbing with job lots of celebrities, that "revelling," as Mr. Paine -calls it, "in the universal tribute"--what was its root if not a deep -sense of insecurity, a desire for approval both in his own eyes and in -the eyes of all the world? During those later years in New York, when he -had become so much the professional celebrity, he always timed his -Sunday morning walks on Fifth Avenue for about the hour when the -churches were out. Mr. Paine tells how, on the first Sunday morning, he -thoughtlessly suggested that they should turn away at Fifty-ninth Street -in order to avoid the throng and that Clemens quietly remarked, "I like -the throng." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the Plaza Hotel until -the appointed hour.... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid -the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on -which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was -lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the -multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as -the tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for approval and -corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a -quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted -his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"? -Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obsession: kings, -empresses, princes, archduchesses--what a part they play in his -biography! He is always dragging them in, into his stories, into his -letters, writing about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them, -and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals they have. And as -with kings, so also with great men, or men who were considered great, or -men who were merely notorious. He makes lists of those he has known, -those he has spent evenings with--Mark Twain, to whom celebrity was the -cheapest thing going! Is there not in all this the suggestion of an -almost conscious weakness clutching at strength, the suggestion of some -kind of failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of success? - -Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this same desire for -approval, for corroboration. Mark Twain was supported by the sentiment -of the majority, which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he had -the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the arbiter of all the -elegances; he had virtually the freedom of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and -not only its freedom but a higher rate of payment than any other -_Atlantic_ contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more -reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as -good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells -in 1887, "but I've always done what I could to secure and enlarge my -good opinion of it. I've always said to, myself, 'Everybody reads it and -that's something--it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable -people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by -implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and -fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, -high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody -likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a -note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the -sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, -beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He -rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an -uplifter of the masses; then, with a touch of mock-noble indignation, he -confesses to being a popular entertainer, fully convinced at least that -there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed -to put upon his book an explanatory line: "This is written for the -Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the Members." No plea more -grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great -reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant -of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a -separation between the "Head" and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, -had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for -the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it. - -Mark Twain, in short, knew very well--for I think these illustrations -prove it--that there was something decidedly different between himself -and a great writer. In that undifferentiated mob of celebrities, great, -and less great, and far from great, amid which he moved for a -generation, he was a favored equal. But in the intimate presence of some -isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the -candidate for the mystagogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow -writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude. Was it Browning? -He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied -for a time with the naive self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen? -Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin note-books: "Been taken -for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was -found the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses the word -"literature" in connection with his own work it is with a sudden -self-consciousness that lets one into the secret of his inner humility. -"I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever -been given a degree by any college in any age of the world, so far as I -know," he writes to the authorities of Yale in 1888. A man who freely -compared himself with the melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, -who, in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins," invited his readers, -who already knew how "the born and trained novelist works," to see how -the "jack-leg" does it, could never have been accused of not knowing his -true rank. "You and I are but sewing-machines," he says in "What Is -Man?" "We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care -nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out -Gobelins." - -I think we are in a position now to understand that boundless comic -impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic impudence which led him to propose -to Edwin Booth in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him to -telegraph to W.T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to disarm. I am ready to -disarm. Collect the others; it should not be much of a task now"; which -led him, at the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum, "Why am -I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was -just asking for information." Tempting Providence, was he not, this -child of good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the fates. If -he had not had a certain sense of colossal force, it would never have -occurred to him, however humorously, to place himself on an equality -with Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the Czar and his -magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean. But, on the other hand, it -would never have occurred to him to make these comparisons if he had -felt himself in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are not -only great in energy but masters of themselves let their work speak for -them; men who are not masters of themselves, whose energy, however -great, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are -driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration -from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured -that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare -and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great -fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet -they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure -themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, -therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually -was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which -had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy -that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply -of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable -abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined -with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the -barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of -that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes -one's sole criterion the magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, -ever more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life Mark Twain -was attended by what Mr. Paine calls "psychic evidences"; he never fails -to note the marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is -always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"--he -invented the phrase; strange phenomena of nature rise up in his path. -Three times, while crossing the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each -time he takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the barbarian -conquerors of antiquity, I say, those essential opposites of the -creative spirit, whose control is altogether internal, and who feels -himself the master of his own fate, could have been more in character -than was Mark Twain when he observed, a few months before his death: "I -came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I -expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my -life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no -doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable; freaks, they came in -together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that." - -A comet, this time! And a few pages back we found him comparing himself -with a sewing-machine. Which is he, one, or the other, or both? He seems -to exhibit himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious of -extraordinary powers that make all the world and even the Almighty -solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, -confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed -to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains. A great -genius, in short, that has never attained the inner control which makes -genius great, a mind that has not found itself, a mind that does not -know itself, a spirit that cloaks to the end in the fantasy of its -temporal power the tragic reality of its own essential miscarriage! - -We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret of Mark Twain's -mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy of that little book which he -called his "Bible," "What Is Man?" He was extremely proud of the -structure of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a machine, -"moved, directed, commanded by _exterior_ influences, _solely_," that he -is "a chameleon, who takes the color of his place of resort," that he is -"a mere coffee-mill," which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee -nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of proprietary interest and -pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he -says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving -impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--and is merely a machine and -entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly -possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in -patching and painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession -and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging -fact approaches." You see how it pleases him, how much it means to him, -that final "Truth," how he clings to it with a sort of defiant insolence -against the "imploring argument," the "damaging fact"? "Man originates -nothing," he says, "not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. -He was a machine, and machines do not create." Faith never gave the -believer more comfort than this philosophy gave Mark Twain. - -But is it possible for a creative mind to find "contentment" in denying -the possibility of creation? And why should any one find pride and -satisfaction in the belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the -denial of "free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and the sour -grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and tragic souls who find -comfort in saying that love exists nowhere in the world because they -themselves have missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark -Twain any pleasure to feel that he was "entitled to no personal merit" -for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he -felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of -feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to -achieve--namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, -"Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the -world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the -creative life is the very embodiment of it--the emergence, that is to -say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant, integrating -principle that turns the world he confronts into a mere instrument for -the registration of his own preferences. There is but one -interpretation, consequently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight -in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine: it brought him -comfort to feel that if he was, as he said, a "sewing-machine," it was -the doing of destiny, and that nothing he could have done himself would -have enabled him to "turn out Gobelins." - -From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that Mark Twain was a -frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested development, and beyond this -fact, as we know from innumerable instances the psychologists have -placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of -his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even been -turned, as we shall see; against himself; the poet, the artist in him, -consequently, had withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a -spiritual valetudinarian. - -But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to glance not only -at Mark Twain's life and work, but also at the epoch and the society in -which he lived. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE - - "One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is - dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, - but they are essentially not happy," - - STENDHAL: _On Love in the United States_. - - -In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, -revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather -material for his book, "Life on the Mississippi." It was, naturally, a -profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what -his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an -assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot -of the steamer _Gold Dust_ recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the -pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We -got to be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most of my -time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a -big, full river--for it was high-water season and there was no danger of -the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river--I had her -most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me -there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been -no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a -pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before." - -Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant, that Mark Twain -recorded in these words, a regret for the passing of time and the charm -and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his -"literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not altogether flattering -to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to -ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely "happy and -care-free" a man of Mark Twain's energy and power could hardly, in later -life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he certainly did: all his -days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a -lost paradise. "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done -in my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am a person," he -wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, "who would quit authorizing in a minute to -go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we -see; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, -that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only -by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact -that the earlier pages of "Life on the Mississippi," in which he -pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and -expressive that he ever wrote. - -It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong hankering for the -lost paradise of the pilot-house. It was something more organic, and -Mark Twain provides us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my -subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his book, "it is no -surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have -followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it." A singular -statement for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life, the -two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are nothing else than love -and pride! But Mark Twain writes those words with an almost unctuous -gravity of conviction, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a -pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had -not experienced it in literature. Strange as that may seem, we cannot -question it; we have, simply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi -pilot had, in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist in -him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in him had never been -satisfied again. We do not have to look beyond this in order to -interpret, if not the fact, at least the obsession. He felt that, in -some way, he had been as a pilot on the right track; and he felt that he -had lost this track. If he was always harking back to that moment, then, -it was, we can hardly escape feeling, with a vague hope of finding again -some scent that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious thread -of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it possible that he had, in -fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that -career? It is a bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark -Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to see first what sort -of boy he was, and what sort of society it was he grew up in; then we -shall be able to understand what unique opportunities for personal -growth the career of a pilot afforded him. - -What a social setting it was, that little world into which Mark Twain -was born! It was drab, it was tragic. In "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom -Sawyer" we see it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a -later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled in Hannibal, on -the Mississippi. He was five at the time; his eyes had opened on such a -scene as we find in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary, -discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he -says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, -desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, -wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in -some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"--it is the epic not only -of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. -How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the -scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E.H. Howe's "Story -of a Country Town," for instance, that Western counterpart in sodden -misery of "Ethan Frome"--a book which has only begun to find its public. -This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest, tells us in so -many words that in all his early days he never saw a woman who was not -anaemic and fretful, a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who -was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment. No wonder he has -come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is -no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain -himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, -dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and -foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, -some gigantic garbage-can! Human nature was not responsible for this -debris of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could human nature -rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and murder," we are told, were the -diversions of the capital city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. -It was not very different in normal times along the Mississippi. -Hannibal was a small place; yet Mr. Paine records four separate murders -which Mark Twain actually witnessed as a boy: every week he would see -some drunken ruffian run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, -he saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many gruesome -experiences," exclaims Mr. Paine, "there appear to have been in those -early days!" But let us be moderate: every one was not violent. As for -the majority of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that history -calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion, justice will never be -realistic. The gods of Greece would have gone unwashed and turned gray -at forty and lost their digestion and neglected their children if they -had been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into an irritable -silence. - -A desert of human sand!--the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, -for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions -after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his -letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a -dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities -may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of -existence inevitably droop and wither." - -Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his -mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of -Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with -John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain -"did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are -told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he -seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a -perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of -his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon -him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking -"sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. -Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent -medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals--we have it from "Tom -Sawyer"--"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were -all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, -desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, -without enough power, grating on their own metal. - -Little Sam, as every one called him, was the fifth child in this -household, "a puny baby with a wavering promise of life"; it is -suggested that he was not wanted. Mr. Paine speaks of him somewhere as -"high-strung and neurotic." We are not surprised, therefore, to find him -at three and four "a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies -that sent him capering and swinging his arms, venting his emotions in a -series of leaps and shrieks and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as -he lay rolling in the grass." This is the child who is to retain through -life that exquisite sensibility of which so many observers have spoken. -"Once when I met him in the country," says Mr. Howells, for example, of -his later life, "he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in -bringing down a blackbird; and he described the poor, stricken, glossy -thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as -he might have given a wounded child." Already, in his infancy, his -gentle, winning manner and smile make him every one's favorite. A very -special little flower of life, you see, capable of such feeling that at -twenty-three his hair is to turn gray in the tragic experience of his -brother's death. A flower of life, a wild flower, and infinitely -fragile: the doctor is always being called in his behalf. Before he -grows up he is to have prophetic dreams, but now another neurotic -symptom manifests itself. In times of family crisis, at four, when one -of his sisters is dying, at twelve, after the death of his father, he -walks in his sleep: often the rest of the household get up in the middle -of the night to find this delicate little waif with his eyes shut -"fretting with cold in some dark corner." - -Can we not already see in this child the born, predestined artist? And -what sort of nurture will his imagination have? He is abandoned to the -fervid influences of the negro slaves,--for his father had moments of a -relative prosperity. Crouching in their cabins, he drinks in wild, weird -tales of blood-curdling African witchcraft. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, -"an atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for the imagination -of a delicate child." One thinks indeed of an image that would have -pleased Heine, the image of a frail snow-plant of the North quivering, -flaming in the furnace of the jungle. Mark Twain appears to have been -from the outset a center of interest, radiating a singular potency; and -the more his spirit was subjected to such a fearful stimulus the more -urgently he required for his normal development the calm, clairvoyant -guidance a pioneer child could never have had. The negroes were "in real -charge of the children and supplied them with entertainment." What other -influence was there to counter-balance this? - -One, and one only, an influence tragic in its ultimate consequences, the -influence of Mark Twain's mother. That poor, taciturn, sunstruck -failure, John Clemens, was a mere pathetic shadow beside the woman whose -portrait Mark Twain has drawn for us in the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer." -She who was regarded as a "character" by all the town, who was said to -have been "the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the best -dancer, in all Kentucky," who was still able to dance at 80, and lived -to be 87, who belonged, in short, to "the long-lived, energetic side of -the house," directed her children, we are told--and we can believe -it--"with considerable firmness." And what was the inevitable -relationship between her and this little boy? "She had a weakness," says -Mr. Paine, "for the child that demanded most of her mother's care.... -All were tractable and growing in grace but little Sam ... a delicate -little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and put to bed." In -later life, "you gave me more uneasiness than any child I had," she told -him. In fact, she was always scolding him, comforting him, forgiving -him, punishing and pleading with him, fixing her attention upon him, -exercising her emotions about him, impressing it upon his mind for all -time, as we shall come to see that woman is the inevitable seat of -authority and the fount of wisdom. - -We know that such excessive influences are apt to deflect the growth of -any spirit. Men are like planets in this, that for them to sail clear in -their own orbits the forces of gravity have to be disposed with a -certain balance on all sides: how often, when the father counts for -nothing, a child becomes the satellite of its mother, especially when -that mother's love has not found its normal expression in her own youth! -We have seen that Mark Twain's mother did not love her husband; that her -capacity for love, however, was very great is proved by the singular -story revealed in one of Mark Twain's letters: more than sixty years -after she had quarreled with that young Lexington doctor, and when her -husband had long been dead, she, a woman of eighty or more, took a -railway journey to a distant city where there was an Old Settlers' -convention because among the names of those who were to attend it she -had noticed the name of the lover of her youth. "Who could have imagined -such a heart-break as that?" said Mr. Howells, when he heard the story. -"Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no -more noise than a grave under foot." It made no noise, but it -undoubtedly had a prodigious effect upon Mark Twain's life. When an -affection as intense as that is balked in its direct path and repressed -it usually, as we know, finds an indirect outlet; and it is plain that -the woman as well as the mother expressed itself in the passionate -attachment of Jane Clemens to her son. We shall note many consequences -of this fact as we go on with our story. We can say at least at this -point that Mark Twain was, quite definitely, in his mother's -leading-strings. - -What was the inevitable result? I have said, not, I hope, with too much -presumption, that Mark Twain had already shown himself the born, -predestined artist, that his whole nature manifested what is called a -tendency toward the creative life. For that tendency to become -conscious, to become purposive, two things were necessary: it must be -able, in the first place, to assert itself and in the second place to -embody itself in a vocation; to realize itself and then to educate -itself, to realize itself in educating itself. And, as we know, the -influences of early childhood are, in these matters, vitally important. -If Jane Clemens had been a woman of wide experience and independent -mind, in proportion to the strength of her character, Mark Twain's -career might have been wholly different. Had she been catholic in her -sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no matter how more than -maternal her attachment to her son was, she might have placed before him -and encouraged him to pursue interests and activities amid which he -could eventually have recovered his balance, reduced the filial bond to -its normal measure and stood on his own feet. But that is to wish for a -type of woman our old pioneer society could never have produced. We are -told that the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer" is a speaking portrait of Jane -Clemens, and Aunt Polly, as we know, was the symbol of all the taboos. -The stronger her will was, the more comprehensive were her repressions, -the more certainly she became the inflexible guardian of tradition in a -social regime where tradition was inalterably opposed to every sort of -personal deviation from the accepted type. "In their remoteness from -'the political centers of the young Republic," says Mr. Howells, in "The -Leatherwood God," of these old Middle Western settlements, "they seldom -spoke of the civic; questions stirring the towns of the East; the -commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were; -unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest." And in the slave -States it was not the abolitionist alone whose name was held, as Mr. -Paine says, "in horror," but every one who had the audacity to think -differently from his neighbors. Jane Clemens, in short, was the -embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism which had proved -so favorable to the life of enterprising action but which perceived the -scent of the devil in any least expression of what is now known as the -creative impulse. She had a kind heart, she was always repenting and -softening and forgiving; it is said that whenever she had to drown -kittens, she warmed the water first. But this, without opening any -channel in a contrary direction, only sealed her authority! She won her -points as much by kindness as by law. Besides, tradition spoke first in -her mind; her hand was quicker than her heart; in action she was the -madonna of the hairbrush. And what, specifically, was it that she -punished? Those furtive dealings of Huck and Tom with whitewash and -piracy were nothing in the world--and that is why all the world loves -them--but the first stirrings of the normal aesthetic sense, the first -stirrings of individuality. - -Already I think we divine what was bound to happen in the soul of Mark -Twain. The story of "Huckleberry Finn" turns, as we remember, upon a -conflict: "the author," says Mr. Paine, "makes Huck's struggle a -psychological one between conscience and the law, on one side, and -sympathy on the other." In the famous episode of Nigger Jim, "sympathy," -the cause of individual freedom, wins. Years later, in "The Mysterious -Stranger," Mark Twain presented the parallel situation we noted in the -last chapter: "we found," says the boy who tells that story, "that we -were not manly enough, nor brave enough to do a generous action when -there was a chance that it could get us into trouble." Conscience and -the law, we see, had long since prevailed in the spirit of Mark Twain, -but what is the conscience of a boy who checks a humane impulse but "boy -terror," as Mr. Paine calls it, an instinctive fear of custom, of tribal -authority? The conflict in "Huckleberry Finn" is simply the conflict of -Mark Twain's own childhood. He solved it successfully, he fulfilled his -desire, in the book, as an author can. In actual life he did not solve -it at all; he surrendered. - -Turn to the record in Mr. Paine's biography. We find Mark Twain in -perpetual revolt against all those institutions for which his mother -stood. "Church ain't worth shucks," says Tom Sawyer. As for school, "he -never learned to like it. Each morning he went with reluctance and -remained with loathing--the loathing which he always had for anything -resembling bondage and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of -liberty." One recalls what Huck said of Aunt Polly just before he made -his escape to the woods: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she - won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air get through 'em somehow, and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - -But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally or in any other -way. He never even imagined that his feelings of revolt had any -justification. We remember how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some -escapade, they would resolve to "lead a better life" to go to church, -visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and subsist wholly upon -tracts. That was what Mark Twain did: "not to do so," says, Mr. Paine, -"was dangerous. Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were -heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced him of that." -And his mother was so strong, so courageous, the only strong and -courageous influence he knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he -set them down"--the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and -beaten and sold--"as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a -taste for a better life." Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence -himself, not to play with freedom! "He felt that it was his own -conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother's -idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions." Naturally! And -she "punished him and pleaded with him, alternately"--with one -inevitable result. "'To fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote -to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly described that old feeling which -I used to have"; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a -preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be -damned." Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and -preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had -become in his eyes the "bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to -mention the creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"? - -Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and -flourished like a blade of grass between the cobblestones of Calvinism. -Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other -traditions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities--how can we compare -the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, -horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell -of his infancy and find a vocation there? Calvinism itself had gone to -seed: it was nothing but the dead hand of custom; the flaming priest had -long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he -could find nowhere, either in men or in books, the bread and wine of the -spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, -Frank Burrough, who had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is -record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named -Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincinnati. "They were long fermenting -discourses," Mr. Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to -that winter in Macfarlane's room." And what was the counsel which, from -that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received?--that "man's -heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only -animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunkenness" and that his -intellect was only a "depraving addition to him which, in the end, -placed him in a rank far below the other beasts." Propitious words for -this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with -books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is a memorable picture of the -library in the typical gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to -New Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering," "Affection's -Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa," "Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's -Book," "piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an -inherited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the cultural -background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh -stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the -foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark -Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, -which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half -a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. -"It gave him his cue," says Mr. Paine, "the first word of a part in the -human drama," and he conceived a sudden interest in history and -languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the -least protection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of -fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke. - -In all his environment, then, we see, there was nothing to assist in the -transformation of an unconscious artistic instinct, however urgent, into -a conscious artistic purpose. "Dahomey," wrote Mark Twain once, "could -not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. -Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not -itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of -stimulating exterior circumstances." He was reciting his own story in -those words. But the circumstances that surrounded Mark Twain were not -merely passively unfavorable to his own self-discovery; they were -actively, overwhelmingly unfavorable. He was in his mother's -leading-strings, and in his mother's eyes any sort of personal -self-assertion in choices, preferences, impulses was, literally, sinful. -Thus the whole weight of the Calvinistic tradition was concentrated -against him at his most vulnerable point. His mother, whom he could not -gainsay, was unconsciously but inflexibly set against his genius; and -destiny, which always fights on the side of the heaviest artillery, -delivered, in his twelfth year, a stroke that sealed her victory. - -Mark Twain's father died. Let Mr. Paine picture the scene: - -"The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with -him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, -indifference to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred -things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-wringing in the -knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother -took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. 'It -is all right, Sammy,' she said. 'What's done is done, and it does not -matter to him any more; but here by the side of him now I want you to -promise me----.' He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung -himself into her arms. 'I will promise anything,' he sobbed, 'if you -won't make me go to school! Anything!' His mother held him for a moment, -thinking, then she said: 'No, Sammy, you need not go to school any more. -Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.' So -he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like -his father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and -justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious -matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held -sacred. That night--it was after the funeral--his tendency to -somnambulism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were sleeping -together, saw the door open and a form in white enter. Naturally nervous -at such a time, and living in a day of almost universal superstition, -they were terrified and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid -on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of the bed. A -thought struck Mrs. Clemens: 'Sam!' she said. He answered, but he was -sound asleep and fell to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet -around him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several nights in -succession after that. Then he slept more soundly." - -Who is sufficiently the master of signs and portents to read this -terrible episode aright? One thing, however, we feel with irresistible -certitude, that Mark Twain's fate was once for all decided there. That -hour by his father's corpse, that solemn oath, that walking in his -sleep--we must hazard some interpretation of it all, and I think we are -justified in hazarding as most likely that which explains the most -numerous and the most significant phenomena of his later life. - -To a hypersensitive child such as Mark Twain was at eleven that -ceremonious confrontation with his father's corpse must, in the first -place, have brought a profound nervous shock. Already, we are told, he -was "broken down" by his father's death; remorse had "laid a heavy hand -on him." But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? -"A hundred things in themselves trifling," which had offended, in -reality, not his father's heart but his father's will as a conventional -citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. -Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings out of this moody child, the -first wavering steps of the soul, that is what they have really been, -these peccadillos, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings -of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed; all those -crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, -are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of -that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, -with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meager traditions. -He is to go forth the Good Boy by _force majeure_, he is to become such -a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his -father's failure, to recover the lost gentility of a family that had -once been proud, to realize that "mirage of wealth" that had ever hung -before his father's eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly -with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to -remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and -all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any -fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away -childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always -a child, your mother's child! In a day to come you will write to one of -your friends, "We have no _real_ morals, but only artificial -ones--morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural -and healthy instincts." Never mind that now; your mother imagines her -heart is in the balance--will you break it?... Will you promise?... And -the little boy, in the terror of that presence, sobs: "Anything!" - -"There is in every man," said Sainte-Beuve, "a poet who dies young." In -truth, the poet does not die; he falls into a fitful trance. It is -perfectly evident what happened to Mark Twain at this moment: he became, -and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism is the proof of it, a -dual personality. If I were sufficiently hardy, as I am not, I should -say that that little sleep-walker who appeared at Jane Clemens's bedside -on the night of her husband's funeral was the spirit of Tom Sawyer, come -to demand again the possession of his own soul, to revoke that ruthless -promise he had given. He came for several nights, and then, we are told, -the little boy slept more soundly, a sign, one might say, if one were a -fortune-teller, that he had grown accustomed to the new and difficult -role of being two people at once! The subject of dual personality was -always, as we shall see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to -his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in childhood, -susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mesmeric control, had shown -from the outset a distinct tendency toward what is called dissociation -of consciousness. His "wish" to be an artist, which has been so frowned -upon and has encountered such an insurmountable obstacle in the -disapproval of his mother, is now repressed, more or less definitely, -and another wish, that of winning approval, which inclines him to -conform with public opinion, has supplanted it. The individual, in -short, has given way to the type. The struggle between these two selves, -these two tendencies, these two wishes or groups of wishes, will -continue throughout Mark Twain's life, and the poet, the artist, the -individual, will make a brave effort to survive. From the death of his -father onward, however, his will is definitely enlisted on the side -opposed to his essential instinct. - -When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on his first excursion -into the great world, he gladly takes the oath, which his mother -administers, "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is -away, an oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do what -seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make his own rejections, has -become actually pleasing to him; it is his own will to make the journey -of life "in bond," as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight. -Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than Mr. Paine's record -shows Mark Twain's to have been! For several years before he was -twenty-one he drifted about as a journeyman printer: he went as far East -as Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter journey lasted -more than a year; one might have expected it to open before him an -immense horizon; yet he seems, to judge from his published letters to -have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts or feelings of -youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of aspiration, of hope, depression, -joy, even ambition! His letters are as full of statistics as the -travel-reports of an engineer, and the only sensation he seems to -experience is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no wish -to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He is, in fact, under a -spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits himself, even from seeking on his -own account that vital experience which is the stuff of the creative -life. - -Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He hears "the old call of -the river." He becomes a pilot. - -Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon -this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the -world was to know later--"dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to -details"--should ever have persisted in acquiring the "absolutely -limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that -Mark Twain "loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and -not only the river, but a steamboat; and still more, perhaps, the -freedom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine omits one -important particular. We have seen that in Mark Twain two opposed groups -of wishes--the wish to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's -approval, to stand in with pioneer society--were struggling for -survival. When we turn to his account of the Mississippi pilots, their -life, their activities, their social position, we can see that in this -career both these wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in -the first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative occupation; -besides this, of all the pioneer types of the Mississippi region, the -pilot alone embodied in any large measure the characteristics of the -artist: in him alone these characteristics were permitted, in him they -were actually encouraged, to survive. - -We cannot understand why this was so without bearing in mind a -peculiarity of the pioneer regime upon which we shall have occasion more -than once to dwell. Mr. Herbert Croly has described it in "The Promise -of American Life." "In such a society," says Mr. Croly, "a man who -persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting -standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. His -finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than -did the current careless and hasty product and his higher standards and -peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of -his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which -naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and -uncritically to current standards. It is no wonder, consequently, that -the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a -special vocation and high standards of achievement. Such a man did -insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under -the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value. -Consequently, they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with -special vocations." - -Here, of course, we have what is by far the most important fact to be -considered in any study of the creative life in the West; as we shall -see, Mark Twain remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own -view of the "special vocation" of literature. What is to be noted now is -that the pilot was an exception, and the only exception in the -Mississippi region, to this general social law. In Nevada, in -California, where Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin -his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system described by Mr. -Croly reigned in its most extreme and uncompromising form; every one had -to be a jack-of-all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The -entire welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the -Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before the war, upon -the expert skill of the pilot; for the river traffic to be secure at -all, he alone, but he at least, had to be a craftsman, a specialist of -the very highest order. There were no signal-lights along the shore, we -are told; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars; the pilot -had to know every bank and dead tree and reef, every cut-off and -current, every depth of water, by day and by night, in the whole stretch -of twelve hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he had to -"smell danger in the dark and read the surface of the water as an open -page." Upon his mastery of that "supreme science," as it was called, -hung all the civilization of the river folk, their trade, their -intercourse with the great centers, everything that stirred them out of -the inevitable stagnation of an isolated village existence. The pilot -was, consequently, in every sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a -"sovereign." Not only did he receive commands from nobody but he was -authorized to resent even the merest suggestion. "I have seen a boy of -eighteen," Mark Twain tells us, "taking a great steamer serenely into -what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing -mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere." Pilots -were, he says, "treated with marked deference by all, officers and -servants and passengers," and he adds naively: "I think pilots were -about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, -embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes." Above all, -and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of -experience in American society, recurs with most significant emphasis, -the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that -highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole -condition without which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. -"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the -only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the -earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people -... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... writers of all kinds are -manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but -then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and -child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day -I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." - -Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a -sort of channel for all the aesthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? -"When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent -ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a -steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were -only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and -material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: -repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for -a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can -hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, -to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating -enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean--first rate, for once! not -second, or third, or fourth--light and bright and gay, radiating a sort -of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, -its trim vigor. And what an air they had of _going_ somewhere, of -_getting_ somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit -of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! -Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of -mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And -the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any -menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and -their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the -fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great -master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that -of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural -passion of the novice lavished, for love of the _metier_, upon the only -creative--shall I say?--at least the only purposive figure in all his -experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the -Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It -was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. -"You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. -I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, -kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what -couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric -magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the -visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the -United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is -unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure aesthetic emotion, produced by a -supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship. - -Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said -in later life, when he used to assert so passionately that man is a mere -chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of -his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and -dictatorship of Circumstance.... Then Circumstance arrived with another -turning-point of my life--a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of -a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became -a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and -out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many -other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other assertion that to -be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts -had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and -respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct -to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited -an enthusiastic interest in craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a -neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;" -"he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required -intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those -printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, -therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the -training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark -Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted -to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to -submit to at any later period of his life. - -In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful -compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his -apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his -apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five -hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his -tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, -unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, -how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": -"even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," -says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament -could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is -to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a -career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, -initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum -all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, -"and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, -if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and -worship it! I want a man to--I want _you_ to--take up a line of action, -and _follow_ it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain -who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man -in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the -book, "I guess this is where our line starts"? - -Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that -shiftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for -dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of -his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, -if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, -meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of -existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing -with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to -have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I -used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things -got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can -trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and -another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, -who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing -down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. -Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the -life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to -study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. -Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books -and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots," -says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, -travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an -education as well as an entertainment to know." - -Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life" -is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was--as -it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you -were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the -world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside -from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and -straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of -some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates -what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle -or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, -application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, -determined spirit." - -It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile sentiment: it is -the emotion of a man who feels himself in the center of the road of his -own destiny. - - - - -CHAPTER III - -THE GILDED AGE - - - "The American democracy follows its ascending march, - uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as - the decrees of eternity." - - GEORGE BANCROFT. - - -You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, -feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim -labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an -artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent -nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp -schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted -with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in -fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in -fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, -for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river." - -Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him -for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as -the streets of London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia -served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will -it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great -writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound -personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the -mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread -in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind -with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits -of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, -he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has -his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circumstance -steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost. - -The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever -to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's -career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative -education, came to an abrupt end. - -Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change -instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to -him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that -exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in -the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that -he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a -military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The -whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with -which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it -does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility, -in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of -twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river -"sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and -purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that -amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and -there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on -the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had -thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and -'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark -Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the -characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile -frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over -his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was -fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a -little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become -organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would -never, in later years, have been led to assert so passionately that man -is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of -self-determination, was so new to this man who had passed his whole -adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent, -chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, -that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back -into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the -one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four -years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship: nothing -stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation. - -A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing -himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the -Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of -the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and -follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book -eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with -a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in -his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and -after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and -scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a -contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have -struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; -that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who -could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution -his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly -yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he -is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the -compulsions of his childhood. - - * * * * * - -But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall -have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about -[the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was -Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance -now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of -his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself. - -What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the -midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties -and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the -beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an -indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the -war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, -as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when -presidents were business men and generals were business men and -preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the -American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of -the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was -virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career -of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was -certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested -public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. -Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he -was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his -Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole -field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I -fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest -field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, -by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his -epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can -see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, -science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I -would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to -have accumulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was -offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into -the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to -burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the -John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than -be Historian or General or President." - -Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have -offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that -of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one -channel passed all the religious fervor of the race. - -I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, -artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works -often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a -story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called -the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love -with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to -make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes -West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and -again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had -made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the -tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would -strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it -then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to -him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was -all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he -persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or -four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I -_must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip -fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am -conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I -will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with -fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when -the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! -"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of -consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were -all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a -golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid -wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and -the Gilded Age is justified in its children. - -Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our -civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the -stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national -epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of -money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious -character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify -that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure -in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of -discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" -consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long -for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence -to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for -it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of -"another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the -mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious -zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in -the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor -of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are -repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has -become the prophet. - -We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to -Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit -of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration -of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and -Letters of John Hay": - - That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on - your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a - judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your - improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not - be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This - summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not - pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The - property you own--be it a tiny cottage or a palace--means so - much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up - whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an - attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization. - -Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances -that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are -the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not -by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in -material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up" -with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, -of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and -most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that -can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the -history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, -and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of -letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the -will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he -was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers -and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the -imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, -therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence -upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own -normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal -culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: -"Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor -and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with -occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the -bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here -one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality -of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything -was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in -his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very -disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be -acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and -notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be -tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he -not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, -and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, -debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what -is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, -for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the -other stars. - -We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we -realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War -were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought -were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, -in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity -of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the -West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success, -that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit -of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have -survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they -would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it -they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they -encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of -adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was -not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the -possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay -before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and -the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up -some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great -rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a -race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through -private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the -group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American -nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation -to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady -welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also -serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests -were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult. - -It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute homogeneity of -feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous folk before the Civil War and the -practical effect of pioneering and the business regime was to keep us -so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the -homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated -it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The -effect of business upon the individual has never been better described -than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I have known, and known -tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men--'big' financially--men -famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do -not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to -meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them -associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A -set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially -unattractive and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has -explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is -as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a -system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his -individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is -determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby -usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or -any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men -are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have -a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities -are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value -of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such -is the result of the business process, and the success of the process -required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually -automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality -significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has -drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the -collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the -collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than -the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere -assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is -called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality, -the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical, -realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly -says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the -man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact, -one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs -and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd. - -For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that -were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to -romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in -feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out -their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the -hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as -one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the -pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed? -Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform -dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an -anaesthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, -without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their -enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for -themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One -recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual -motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its -inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that -buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him -wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated -with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction -between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of -the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the -Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and -half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy -clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a -feudal castle, his wife is a chateleine, his children the baron's cubs, -and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the -broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable -blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the -promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of -his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him -the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the -material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason -and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of -reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these -illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the -story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim -Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to -whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends -used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green -plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums, -"California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one -eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had -to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting, -aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding -sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, -boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the -others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided -him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, -and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the -luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the -romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same -over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names -as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that -made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious -pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to -"boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain -parts of the West. - -Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would -not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the -country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of -criticism, in fact, was regarded as _lese-majeste_ to the folk-spirit of -America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell -the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and -reputation. Who does not remember the story of Dickens's connection -with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil -Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less -attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an -agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and -defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded -as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no -intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong -emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad -and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was -regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was -obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of -actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, -becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant -than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge -Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' -Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll," -says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in -society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, -and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own -notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short, -entitled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary, -that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves -superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If -you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of -your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and -warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent. - -As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America -against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in -England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating -forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse -of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic -prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and -humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name -of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic -industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of -the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins -and the Morrises--in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly -untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar -destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the -state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of -1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While -the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined -place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and -fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, -and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed -that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism -they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were -the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to -victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant." - -Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, -even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the -individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the -human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil -War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or -less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the -rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, -had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were -stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a -natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, -had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories. - -In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the -gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those -days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand _young_ -men--not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, -muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and -royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and -magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious -ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans--none but -erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was -a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths -stayed at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers." -Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature -itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and -calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of -the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order -to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening -space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not -to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the -future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who -were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the -towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of -story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the -life of this New England countryside during the generation that -followed--those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants -of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population -only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What -a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!--a -civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death. -Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation -as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those -manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the -generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole -spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a -neurotic anaemia in which it has remained so largely to this day. - -This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of -its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the -unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the -fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. -Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper -in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it -was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them -high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they -were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure -shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, -just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's -unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the -winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an -extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the -less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had -gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had -not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed -them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like -Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in -Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the -stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American -past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the -conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was -not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright -light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left -behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men -westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and -the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her -complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had -become the pacemaker in the arts. - -One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new -regime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England -that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to -carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien -editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, was consecrated to the high priesthood -by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, -already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly -appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a -young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he -resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life--an -incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his -prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own -unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America -anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. -His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an -essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his -superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed -him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative -reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all -masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured -point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate -any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his -position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what -Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, -from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and -submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and -formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide -the notion of the artist's role through which he had found his own -salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the -religious, moral and social taboos of the time. - -I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy -actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now -that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply -played into the hands of the business regime? The taboos of the one -supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of -both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring -as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, -disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the -fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled -Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who -possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what -necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that -drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during -the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against -the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, -that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry -Adams his novel, "Democracy." - -With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these -men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, -motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding -type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong -assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon -which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of -literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist -and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who -are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and -disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American -minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of -William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad -crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate -minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of -glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing -materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see -from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, -these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by -theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers -who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age -that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop -to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form. - -Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: -no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; -there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, -for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing -eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping -with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes -that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything -essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, -admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he -mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a -belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism -of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural -possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely -upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does -not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of -life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his -eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism -of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic -dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play -in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of -decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, -of inarticulate misery--read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of -the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other -nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or -next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would -have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch -without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing -upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna -of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, -moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain -hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had -forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the -welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's -"manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of -pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the -disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a -certain beautiful residuum of truth. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -IN THE CRUCIBLE - - - "The American proposes to realize his individuality freely - and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and - free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly - consenting that some other person, better qualified or more - competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when - he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to - will." - - GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: _The People of Action_. - - -Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the -gold-fields of Nevada--the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one -that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded -Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the -woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about -a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good -time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a -child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him -out for destruction. - -Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confreres of -the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of -history, travels, literature and the sciences--a young man whom it was -an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says -Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going, -indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as -one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a -certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from -the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of -barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and -dandy--in fancy percales and patent leathers--in white duck and striped -shirts--he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch -hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of -the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in -dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further -than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable -surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And -whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his -utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life -as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing -vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't -suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier -frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching -thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half -the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the -indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of -development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him -had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had -been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more. -He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment. - -Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true -of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of -previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common -fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the -gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it -was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were -transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion -of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing -It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of -the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there -as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the -'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever -produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves -were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other -vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost -fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes -that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in -every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military -companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters, -'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, -civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey -mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and -station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church. -The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock -lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North -to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development." - -This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly -opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark -Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he -might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing -spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark -Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, -far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make -terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such -a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make -money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family--that old pledge was -fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his -failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own. -Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was -the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally -enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great -triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered -it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were -gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to -exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing -what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, -more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the -river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his -father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had -become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother -Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of -success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the -position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say, -compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not -fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for -him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine -once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make -good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also -become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his -Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look -upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or -revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man. - -What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself? -A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of -inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the -indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had -obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was -indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was -tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held -absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the -rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who -submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher -standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the -easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency -of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." -Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative -instinct, therefore--and he was anything but fully aware of them--he -could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his -craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to -acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of -sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--all -those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct--were, from -the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely -in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken -down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the -tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in -them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his -own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly -organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of -torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe, -which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering -words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks -of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was -always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous -hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it -our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He -was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality -was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a -day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were -incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who -was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated -at first, he always yielded in the end. - -Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive -instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was -stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one -could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one -afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying -'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would -come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he -would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going -after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all -their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around -to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next -forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual -facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself -strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as -twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a -foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest -a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand -in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you -that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had -to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not -merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his -level best to become a millionaire. - -It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain -failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth -a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with -exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he -failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new -work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. -Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment--these were the -qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life -had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of -his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in -spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not -fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He -went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied -me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. -"The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, -"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their -movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and -suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom -humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are -likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the -flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense -anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other -extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up -everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his -comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to -the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to -bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a -critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed -simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to -succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and -yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly -anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark -Twain's business life. - -So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious -desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of -individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in -the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted -him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the -necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American -writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain -solved by becoming a humorist. - -Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's -soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more -than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of -his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he -would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off -"alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely -from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at -all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his -surroundings"--wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would -hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything -else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to -establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the -fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." -"He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner -who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a -camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!--all the -contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's -fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to -succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in -himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives -in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted -to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any -one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up -hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary -paper in Virginia City; hell!" - -Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary -pretensions called the _Enterprise_, which was edited and written by a -group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was -to the _Enterprise_ that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and -at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he -presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with -profound reluctance. - -Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born -writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any -opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a -life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have -gravitated toward such people as the _Enterprise_ group: that he did so -is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But -committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a -different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky -journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the -pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a -good time," says Mr. Paine. "The _Enterprise_, 'Comstock to the -backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain -could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself -with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, -as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" -says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as -a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he -fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when -"the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all -hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding -himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile -walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," -says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he -came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How -different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his -piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked -forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an -inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself -and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a -capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a -hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the _Enterprise_ office worn and -travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard -leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about -one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he -added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It -was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to -claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is -something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that -suggests not an acclamation but a surrender? - -Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the -_Enterprise_ Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He -attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to -me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to -break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the -surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure." -No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more -or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on -the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was -relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune -that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were -plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him -reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself -so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to -excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, -and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this -opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must -consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but -the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the -creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but -actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the -_Enterprise_ mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he -had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, -and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of -a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by -the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was -this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens -the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark -Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the _Enterprise_ -was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate -that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige, -the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if -he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would -prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any -other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For -him, therefore, the opportunity of the _Enterprise_ meant an obligation -to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he -wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would -not have displayed such reluctance in joining the _Enterprise_, and the -fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a -humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling -his own soul. - -Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come -to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. -But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his -amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading -together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his -triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and -said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself--I am allowing -myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any -longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied -himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to -choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not -only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many -instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a role which he -apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate -all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it. - -But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. -Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer -rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the -mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new -title"--the pen-name he had adopted--"and its success." He knew that his -severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, -worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he -was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a -rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that -promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the -mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately -proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his -new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we -actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to -telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That -he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that -he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a -commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: -"His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," -says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not -with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was -necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a -good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the -_nom de plume_ was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, -crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations -in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted -a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his -merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the -time--in pioneer circles, especially, observe--simply argues that all -the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a -form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own -persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting -coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe -water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in -Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought -of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which -he was proud only because it paid. - -It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he -had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone -astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was -intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was -desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the -evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been -here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We -are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find -with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again." -Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is -certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is -crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his -journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No--not -home again--in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The -city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business -anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had -become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had -been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a -loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the -trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New -York as he is about to start on the _Quaker City_ excursion which is to -result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two -letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of -his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he -says: "I am wild with impatience to move--move--_move_!... Curse the -endless delays! They always kill me--they make me neglect every duty and -then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never -had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am -so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish -anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored -full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an -accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless -moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly -unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his -family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the -most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful -exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely -its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself -to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, -transgressed his principle of growth? - -One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in -New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it -was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in -the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr. -Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while -for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a -lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought -disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus -Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it -as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he -believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written -January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what -to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up -and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save -piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be -excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single -out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and -His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to -please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed -that he had not even offered it to _The Californian_, the magazine to -which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard -it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter -prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he -has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other -hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for -it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate -him, this poor, ingenuous being!--this divided soul who has never been -able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows -no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his -own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping -Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone -rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary -edifice." - -So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted -this role unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic -self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying -that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative -instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive -instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that -instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by -public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine, -"was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that -never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings -of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been -to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even, -constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler -calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order -to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak -child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal -life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his -companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled -in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular. -United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make -money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it -received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected, -repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb -and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest. - -Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights -of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets. -Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes -of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to -laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered -a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the -mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his -improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect." -He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a -bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The -Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some -degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute -accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the _Quaker City_ he -found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry -Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to -follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second -book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and -intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides -this, it brought him the recognition of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It -brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the -postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a -choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be -disposed to accept--"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a -Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's -appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It -brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, -assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London--mine being -(between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was -received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the -long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least -one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on -any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in -gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when -one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite -actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred -against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." -Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which -he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset -his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in -Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go -home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic -conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient -in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had -made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had -pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in -America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored -regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely -overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most. - -It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James -Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in -their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a -humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing -that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be -something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they -found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant -something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of -culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal -visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but -to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only -ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been -a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent -barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the -presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen -applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a -dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do -it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to -his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being -gulled, and partly because he wasn't--because the beautiful force of -his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere, -because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets, -are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with -slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was -not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was -being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way, -by the people who really _knew_, whose judgment could really be trusted. -Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply -countersigning the verdict of America. - -For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain -men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have -seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation -into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment -when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business -agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about -this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But -the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America -played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over -to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward--these -must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a -diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was -not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything -less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all -their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made. - -It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus -Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada -world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are -told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps -with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too -could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's -counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit -with possibilities of inner growth before him--what could Artemus Ward -have known about such things?--but as an embryonic institution, so to -speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself -and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he -ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was -subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," -said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement -of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and -character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with -inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had -been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we -look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les -Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for -knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can -we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not -withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, -had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not -already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America -capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said -to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least -resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your -mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend--into life -and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and -"extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never -forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he -acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and -refined party" of the _Quaker City_ excursion which led him to the feet -of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward -Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread -and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," -said he--Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now -here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to -deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than -enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do -it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him -how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his -percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in -the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were -the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men -of statecraft, literature and divinity. - -Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance -of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner -peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him -committed to the pursuit of worldly success. - -That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a -creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. -He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral -infantility. We know that the role of laugh-maker had, from early -adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in -Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers -laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud -and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, -where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his -audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, -he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in -public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had -returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held -so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That -persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to -a _metier_ in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of -craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It -was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least -resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was -falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied -that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the -artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a -journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance. - -Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he -wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have -doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, -except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." -To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success -of his book--a success the like of which had scarcely been known in -America--Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a -journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and -editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the -rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer -with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that -Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's -fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest -point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had -temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now -again literature had dropped into the background, had become an -avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial -interests!--there were whole years during which he thought of hardly -anything else. - -This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, -with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic -attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to -"follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a -series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage -of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the -same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of -adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was -this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered -by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the -success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other -autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige -machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning -to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary -life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the -boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a -peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other -phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various roles he has -played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or -education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I -ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that -under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the -reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really -experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all -different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the -artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an -infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he -tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and -again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There -was nothing new in that story"--"The American Claimant"--"but the -finger-prints in this one is virgin ground--absolutely _fresh_, and -mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied -a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded -to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public -wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with -what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"--the -possibilities of this, the possibilities of that--in the commercial, not -in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the -promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with -its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, -in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series -that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not -as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally -conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his -life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot -and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant -of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naively, -"but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a -thing as an artist had never existed. - -Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark -Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his -agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, -Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain -hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is -reputation anyway--money is secondary." So he floods the house with -complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he -says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune -didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and -your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the -country." It was true. But in that moment--that typical moment, in that -reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's -die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with -generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to -walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes -to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a -spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a -formidable spirit, that _alter ego_ within him,--he is going to hear its -bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: -his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the -dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned -over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished -to secure a government appointment for Orion." - -Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable -sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says--with an emphasis of his -own--he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. -From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called -adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence -without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" -now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments." - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY - - - "Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as - bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride." - - IBSEN: _The Comedy of Love_. - - -The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, -consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead -himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and -still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most -consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own -way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy -calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what -Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, -of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so -little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in -America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: -"in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious -things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to -practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon -one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the -bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. -No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of -industry. - -Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he -put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light -are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if -Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the -children of light he would have been perfectly free--to starve and to -shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its -moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he -could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the -recognized American game according to the recognized American rules. - -Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct -of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just -because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks -of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that -people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling -them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the -lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a -personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his -environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear -for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the -most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without -foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. -Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he -wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, -to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left -vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished -him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he -met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make -good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew -the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in -prestige, stood to him _in loco parentis_; and, to complete the ironic -circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a -Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them -he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. -Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody." - -The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later -years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we -are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser -Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit -heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions -that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the -will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus -Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what -they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret -Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently -until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to -a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in -the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above -all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first -moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary -affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature -and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean -Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The -Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the -woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom -with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual -rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by -his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the -self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go -his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always -been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve -it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S. -McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself. - -In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to -the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the -prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a -contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the -community to which money is the primary condition and the primary -instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew -Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged -to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the -spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an -expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a -young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued -now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And -meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social -inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish -manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness--everything that made -foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that -would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to -consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of -a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of -bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had -ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had -become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of -humor was a gold-mine--so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently -cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He -was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he -wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot -properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we -realize that he had been manoeuvered into the role of a candidate for -gentility. - -But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had -been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his -creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead -father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his -mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man, -in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take -precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been -the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the -days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he -was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go -back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure -as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained -precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time, -we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever--proud (even if somewhat, -critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had -been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, -scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In -turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the -same Sam, and always would be--a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true -that Mark Twain, _who_ required authority as much as he required -affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who -would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be -mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at -least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and -afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the _Quaker -City_ party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and -character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed -my buttons on," he wrote--he was thirty-two at the time--"kept my -clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), -lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only -natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife -"implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his -subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, -"she edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my -works--she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the -totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia -Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death -Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her. -Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about -him?--"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was, -I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken -the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place. -Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara -Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the -billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."--a sign that was -always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been -called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used -to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him -straight--"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he -went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have -been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue -of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male. - -As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest -that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been -affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other -reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to -adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest -instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of -success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with -the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on -terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old -renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make -good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated -obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just -as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or -finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little -less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying -that, automatically, her gods had become his. - -It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations -between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere -of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even -of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is -regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English -criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, -Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family -and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village -ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At -bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic -analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is -of profound importance to society and because they know that what any -man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and -affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind -that all the best biographies even of our American worthies--Hamilton, -Franklin and Lincoln, for instance--have been written by Englishmen! No -one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society -has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, -therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited -his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, -whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his role as a realist and -carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her -heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest -has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and -that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations -and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist -and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of -European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New -Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as -creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. -Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, -she stepped immediately into a role far more truly influential than that -of any President. - -Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and -mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in -any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization -all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual -culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted -down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had -attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social -stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, -fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter -generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular -sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, -imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to -submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august -brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains -on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with -their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The -quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect -based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of -the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice -proclaimed them sacrosanct. - -We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a -presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place--a place -of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, -pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the -daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not -to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame -did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted -almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that -Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of -Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he -had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had -been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect -for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt -himself, the interloper then--he would not have been Carlyle but the -stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark -Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl -without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned -anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been -conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her -friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore--and love -compelled him to do that--he had to win the approval and the pride of -Elmira itself, he had to win the _imprimatur_ of all that vast and -intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the -symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," -that "no one was good enough for her--certainly not this adventurous -soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark -Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy -upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in -order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in -California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his -character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the -"worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover -on his mettle? - -Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this -new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able -to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his -candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the -vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and -lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know, -"he had become suddenly a person of substance--an associate of men of -consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He -was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to -that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to -refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But -could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we -are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his -financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book," -he wrote, "unless there was _money_ in it, and a good deal of it"; he -had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and -"conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were -almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent -and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his -marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already--the best possible -omen for one with his resources--$22,000 in debt! He had put his -shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even -faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so -manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being -equal--and his wife would see to that--he really was a safe, -conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon -capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain, -anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to -cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been -accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course -they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and -besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start -them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in -"The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal -that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, -whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all -significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author -adds, naively, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated -as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon -in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally -stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that -this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his -gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot -forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable -street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage -and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous _menage_. -It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's -wedding day!--he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the -confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely -committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the -outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly -shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had -foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, -"lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper -enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the -ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the -ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged -it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound -himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that -Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo _Express._ -Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business -man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one. - -The full consequences of this moral surrender--shall we call it?--can -only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, -precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently -and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he -might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in -his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many -other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven -back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect _horror_ and -heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the -bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I -cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I -suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you -would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have -wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems -to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who -was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His -bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. -"Farewell--a long farewell--to business!" he exclaimed during those -weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will _never_ touch -it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I -will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as -follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good -and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer -up--don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has -been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. _Except_ when I think of -you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving -and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem -to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the -dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but -no dishonor--and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, -Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she -doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't -convince _me_!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary -of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before -all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, -who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her -husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind -in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. -She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and -all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in -the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to -retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very -ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he -was involved more and more deeply in it. - -As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation -as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should -adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that -he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the -matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had -promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was -laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed -his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical -type--at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete -invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to -sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her -back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, -to arise and walk--Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, -and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. -"I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark -Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first -child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal -absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his -wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I -am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am -done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith -to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What -chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the -pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find -his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never -possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new -life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are -valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are -admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that -private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime -interests of man. - -"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is -said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and -the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all -matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. -"Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of -supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for -the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a -little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely -going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had -been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; -but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and -purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his -personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she -set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in -each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward -the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, -indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred; -she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of -religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his -religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens -had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... -It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family -prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a -Bible chapter." Thus was reestablished over him that old Calvinistic -spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a -child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what -fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious -man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, -for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," -says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly -with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with -the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the -proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had -long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she -prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness -to which he, the chivalrous Southerner--the born cavalier, in -reality--could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him -"Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in -keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could -never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only -accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he -gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her -"exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own -judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as -another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would -quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral." - -It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the -blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in -turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive -about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me -do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was -partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, -but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between -the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial -body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in -their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was -also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried -to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having -annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in -order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose -approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of -embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table -that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, -"and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was -almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the -guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells -after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells -bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than -we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last -moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send -her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more -for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for -mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, -after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had -privately suggested to you that we hadn't any _frames,_ and that if you -wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was -simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How _could_ -you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive -nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have -been intolerable to her that, at the _Atlantic_ dinners, her husband, in -spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood -was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as -Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, -unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all -hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his -Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace -does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my -list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I -was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my -repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as -an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not -been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it -tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, -as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods. - -Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character -can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his -marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter -of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of -letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept -him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial -assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo _Express_; in return, -he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his -Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be -immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate -editorship of the Buffalo _Express_ without a single word of comfort or -encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to -be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word -shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom -is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more -innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage -had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of -chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already -induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting -"parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal, -the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could -manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief -censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed -him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture, -meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please -Boston--impossible, terrifying task!--had become as obligatory upon Mark -Twain as to please Elmira. - -We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the -Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider -the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared -to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of -his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston -audience--4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and -he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in -a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a -charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells -was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the -nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the -latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her -husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled -them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter -of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a -court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him--to his -own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to -your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who -takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and -of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject -when Livy took charge of me ... and I may _still_ be to the rest of the -world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no -doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been -enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as -an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own -self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in -behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no -comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were -themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges -of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's -neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It -seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an -old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great -embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder -that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do -about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats -and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In -this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility--provincial because it -was without a sense of proportion--were kept constantly before his mind -and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the -Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad -threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple -Delilah his wife. - -For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a -taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The -criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens -and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they -formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to -read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of -life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could -not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion -of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud, -under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible -and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive -ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, -was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold -novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language -for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at -work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so -greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather -discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all. -"Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs. -Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable -damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other -way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind -fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And -shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by -the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy -says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're -going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly -gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits -and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody -might have written but whose romantic mediaevalism was equally -respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs. -Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have -been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." -Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural -genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such -subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if -we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in -these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of -"blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark -Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only -tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly -pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds: -"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He -persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet -acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to -friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so -little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this -mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, -precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to -live down. - -Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the role of critic and censor. A -memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over -the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her -task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them: - - Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word - would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty - often. - - But can't I get it in _any_where? You've knocked it out - every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, - good word. - - Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing - a slave boy. - - It's out, and my father is whitewashed. - - Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change - "breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. - I would take that and "offal" out of the language. - - You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy. - - - -We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive -as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility -and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, -no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no -artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for -bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his -latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as -something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of -conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, -specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; -and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to -further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially -as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, -as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash -not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. -Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't -afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his -letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the -"swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the -thing Huck would say"--namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark -Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a -certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of -Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it -into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his -conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the -German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. -Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. -Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute -she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her -tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to -miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. -Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my -scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little -one-sided?" - -They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers -behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for -an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. -"Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party--in -Rome--he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one -wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. -Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, -you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, -regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've -been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these -tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an -ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. -Very humiliating, and also very tragic! - -Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western -life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to -win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, -seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant -word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of -liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess -that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" -was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that -grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to -formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, -free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, -he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins -themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And -in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all -the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, -instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the -genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature -and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to -seek. - -Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain -Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty -years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough -in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it -assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he -wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his -little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up -and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one -more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do -anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, -and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one -locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in -1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular -success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he -had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from -pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire--we know it as -much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his -own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious -to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of -corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was -here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid -before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: -'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere -magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself--publish it -first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some -of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There -was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of -the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark -Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe -in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! -The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was -to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great -leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child -who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to -smoke the pipe of truth. - -Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it -shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe -and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man--is it -remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, -happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, -the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game -as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns -an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life -is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, -as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five -on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week -day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss -wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, -on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a -will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from -responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of -creating standards of his own and living up to them? - -"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," -wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which -influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets -him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find -himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose -approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's -command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a -deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views -which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and -blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in -public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like -the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his -environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color--had -he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul? - -"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his -life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had -never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor -express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more -idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any -possibility have occurred to him to _resolve_ to become brave. He _could -not originate the idea_--it had to come to him from the _outside_." - -The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of -Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic -plea in self-extenuation? - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR - - - "Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole - capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he - cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping - friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what - one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. - This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ." - - IBSEN: _Letter to Brandes_,1870. - - -And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that -all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, -uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and -passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who -used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. -Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher -of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark -Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and -unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he -has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every -great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous -relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined -to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian -interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the -labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his -individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to -type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer -environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering -in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, -from the outset of his life, subjected itself! - -Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy -as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," -he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition -was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and -uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas -and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an -expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; -trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark -Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a -person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven -to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they -did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, -to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the -husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the -purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and -entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of -his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this -narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so -powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that -instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood. - -We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's -universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he -seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his -fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his -nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. -"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a -heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes -and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and -lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came -home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its -eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from -this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed -neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the -worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one -great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's -home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his -domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any -monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; -it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And -having accepted the role of the opulent householder, he threw into it as -much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work. - -Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going -to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses -were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up -to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," -"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, -according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to -increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at -hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for -explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those -who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand -that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, -mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something -almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent -considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of -living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for -some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, -not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel -Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the -visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently -extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was -living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses -amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In -the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could -furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and -highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural -taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, -would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those -early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his -"disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that -finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large -hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, -"he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and -delight of his guests. There were _always_ guests; they were coming and -going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a -'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of -his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay -the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he -virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer -months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his -mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these -things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that -they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed -for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit -cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more -ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the -child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she -found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy! - -To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the -public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the -beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large -consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of -adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up -in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of -the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have -remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and -become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing -need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a -professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a -waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt -requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of -casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a -postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use--not to mention -the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were -his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. -He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of -other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding -he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first -author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work--his -impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in -this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"--that he -had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had -been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can -add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and -one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see -one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact -that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to -which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to -the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the -following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of -marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a -spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises -amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is -not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two -hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained -of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had -to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no -choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he -had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of -his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one -month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to -redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for -a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries -of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred -million dollars. - -Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced -in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to -heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? -Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the -distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy -with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to -follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book -because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"--for this he -had, in fact, become--he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might -say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular -enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the -same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the -proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns -to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he -who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten -days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative -principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at -least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, -gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make -millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of -authors--he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the -country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, -"reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone -of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions -a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing -themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them -three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if -his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift -and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he -is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, -impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against -the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it -with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he -has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, -"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means -of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He -"liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was -pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger -to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of -his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of -the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him--"here I -am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt -gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that? - -For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had -adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, -position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation -of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe. - -He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more -oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the -trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What -were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of -Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General -Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the -"Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. -It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it -was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for -getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were -secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost -consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish -weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own -shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what -he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly -confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for -a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, -penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain, -untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, -immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most -interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is -quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of -Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing -figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration -of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because -of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his -faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he -admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, -is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race -prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of -imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American -business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever -held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was -Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut -Yankee," had set out to make mediaeval England a "going concern" could -hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that -phenomenon in all history. - -Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view -of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European -letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the -appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are -told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his -family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a -distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of -the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be -ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated -by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a -feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity -student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he -told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the -deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to -us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew -him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and -circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find -him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely -imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was -carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters -to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged -in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything -on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the -cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it -was in his power and his fame. - -Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in -the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set -against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, -Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the -headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and -infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has -seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with -complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept -as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding -materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing -so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In -1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a -Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of -improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested -that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he -was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the -great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the -framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far -Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the -colors of the privileged class which the new industrial regime had -brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a -member. - -His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his -essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in -the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to -his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence -and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends -the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for -the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets -the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy -which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more -nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the -tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, -against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I -finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every -time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay -the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not -a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy -of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish -to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, -"Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a -scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a -Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous -defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, -tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he -was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one -situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for -trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he -would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, -frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which -he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent -to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages -in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on -the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on -the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London -drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the -Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the -insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of -sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral -splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men -benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly -opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this -was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time -he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have -afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his -letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry -views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily -written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to -dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud -voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of -his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing -attendance on him!--how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not -hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly -have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the -principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic -victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one -situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate -the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; -and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his -dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an -article passionately advocating that the salaries of American -ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be -devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true -function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing -it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial -society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement. - -As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take -precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with -him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the -pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the -feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on -England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the -scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend -those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson -having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English -Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to -the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, -how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic -bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was -regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. -As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to -include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less -and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself -against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious -tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with -very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive -economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in -his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply -he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, -then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in -his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more -than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had -once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy -Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to -say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I -never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore -when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to -the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant -self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel -of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the -Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for -in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is -lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a -Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book -or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find -him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other -Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into -his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint -Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut -Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch -whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to -accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was -Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself -over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he -who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in -a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy -Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there -recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his -Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of -Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated. - -So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed -reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty -liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the -American nation in the hollow of his hand--the nation, or rather the -epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or -trump--but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home -with his public--he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to -pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he -does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored -family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from -every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark -Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause -would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that -matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole -neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a -unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, -had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor. - -Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character -he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an -uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an -expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his -surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naive worship -of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical -inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of -subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this -let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I -have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, -spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at -all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And -once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular role and had -forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the -pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards -of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he -had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a -reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years -and an ass for fifty-five." - -It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's -instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of -literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was -merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any -other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination -for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other -business man--to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make -money because other people made money and to make more money than other -people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother -Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I -marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is, -literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to -please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the -span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I -have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford -it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." -Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was -sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to -realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and -in the other that he had not lived it--for certainly his marriage had -not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public! -Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so -supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no -conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, -he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business -enterprise and of letters. - -"If Sam had got that pocket"--we remember the saying of his old -California comrade--"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of -his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent -of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he -have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes -happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and -perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its _debacle_, Mark -Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to -stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, -"have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had -been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own -books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were -promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to -write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work -altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so -neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes -of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as -well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of -the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing -business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We -have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have -been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": -of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my -retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain -pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we -can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this -ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical -aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning -Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is -simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade -and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, -found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the -material rewards it brought him. - -How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point -of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those -middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised -men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to -the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the -hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. -Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the -literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's -cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how -Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a -personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the -word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as -against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic -of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the -Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain -disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the -Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to -mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her -husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as -nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the -illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was -identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his -brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting -Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion--At 12:20 this afternoon a -line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the -first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was -done _automatically_--instantly--perfectly. This is indeed the first -line of movable types that ever _was_ perfectly spaced and perfectly -justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the -immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. -Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well--dizzy, -stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human -brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful -mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how -wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered -the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was -fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, -too far away--as even his financial interest was too shallow, after -all--to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable -mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, -of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark -Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a -piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of -the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of -the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations -in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he -called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations -are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets -who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's -seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such -people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had -witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and -innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age -for having produced Walt Whitman. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS - - - "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test - of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" - - JOHN STUART MILL. - - -We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in -Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America -indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we -recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to -the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every -influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of -opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the -real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling -Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which -had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real -Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained -rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a -child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this -childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual -independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work -as a writer. - -"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous -temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one -written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland -where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three -at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing -that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him -to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. -To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as -we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the -torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got -back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he -could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and -when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he -would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been -so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what -he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I -was the kind of person that _does_ things. Does them and reflects -afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without -asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that -time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been -punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and -reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I -still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and -reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition -of immaturity. - -Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for -gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the -fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed -dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes -of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had -the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were -staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go -down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an -elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at -the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the -dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to -this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he -added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went -back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came -down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a -really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. -To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like -descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place -where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous -at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully -protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk -waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was -seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along -the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the -dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for -his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do -the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. -When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at -Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford -pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was -"planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient -Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would -have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or -rather still, Tom Sawyer? - -Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense -of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of -his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not -Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell -that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a -literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not -affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so -increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our -political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where -that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to -have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and -economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his -traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social -tendencies that had so spectacular a _denouement_ within four years of -his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the -century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's -funeral--"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, -"will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from -now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the -Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was -involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might -almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is -scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy -of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of -it--indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity -regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same -rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think -of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a -succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives -wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that -the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of -Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the -world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification -whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was -"entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political -history." - -And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark -Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. -Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of -sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, -political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would -expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for -example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It -requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious -little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the -communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade -every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the -sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? -Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most -conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly -unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all. - -And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped aesthetic -sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the -common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of -an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch -below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the -majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous -acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world -remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in -heaven":--"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to -have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in -matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is -mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going -to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did -he like? In painting, Landseer--"and the way he makes animals absolute -flesh and blood--insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little -and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could -tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the -beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and -that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than -any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs -America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, -Kipling--"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are -told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a -sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained -his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that -Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the -fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar -Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of -doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbo," -which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was -wholly non-aesthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could -stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. -He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's -"Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have -taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of -all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight -in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and -Thanatopsianism--in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the -most primitive form of aesthetic emotion, combined with just those tints -of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are -characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence. - -Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the -mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his -lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic -self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose -extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes -gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of -letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, -the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of -greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his -own juvenility freely registered itself. - -"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very -remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, -"but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have -developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... -he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even." - -I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the -fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has -been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; -she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been -the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, -childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm -perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of -that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was -in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in -upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of -happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual -and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, -Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children -themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house -always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider -scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish -hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by -trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an -energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have -guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells -reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; -admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, -there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story -of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that -story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown -men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy -was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds -the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps -that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it. - -Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there -ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His -mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and -without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off -as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which -would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from -his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable -were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable -to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was -super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was -doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe. - -Unused, half-used, misused--was ever anything like that energy? Mr. -Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because -his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of -darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing -himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, -because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to -the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant -trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of -gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, -unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to -turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the -final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest -as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead -lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, -thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. -Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been -published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't -have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's -letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His -mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance -that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature -tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's -way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the -fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded -manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts -about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the -interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer -Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in -1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly -tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family -censor--"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a -dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn -Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which -Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death--how many others -were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, -loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in -his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions--how -like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of -authority!--was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast -flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk--was it garrulous, was it not -rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an -undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, -following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, -outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind? - -An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty--could there be a -surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all -this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon -who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two -supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his -writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has -monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art. - -Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits -of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is--where -shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can -write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; -"but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I -didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't -play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that -years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a -play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine -articles and books--and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this -a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a -talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of -letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from -attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but -the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and -well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had -interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those -months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He -appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he -found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of -beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true -even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he -was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the -Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd -contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the -publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know -how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." -This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the -composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, -impossible performance"--no doubt because he had been able to write the -whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only -by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He -wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing -and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing -it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but -incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was -probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more -ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession -of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was -he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in -defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was -the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold. - -In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we -observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden -desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot -master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to -interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of -sustained interest in his work--his lack of interest in literature -itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of -his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the -technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, -surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his -aesthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by -aesthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems -to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in -literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. -Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had -never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother -had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, -he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of -Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, -in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane -Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper--is not -that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here -again there was a positive note--his lifelong preoccupation with -grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas -by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly -verbal!--"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful -German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's -Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," -"General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation -in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells -that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for -saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some -imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling -women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward -the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be -infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are -all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his -first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I -suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in -the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with -letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of -"Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring -from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing -off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to -take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially -never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well? - -Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man -is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his -taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some -slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" -having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years -after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright -copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, -although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to -understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, -obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human -spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The -Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark -Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the -expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through -the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican--all the galleries.... We -examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, -Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we -didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar -stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We -fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor -and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its -pet feature--there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and -Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a -hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, -more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known -was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the -American people of his time were simply the English middle class -transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to -Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to -have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife -and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had -subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his -mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an -old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream -of the "land of Egypt"--Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at -all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European -tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. -His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of -the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry -and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of -Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with -these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which -had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all -the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage. - -How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine -speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to -construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate -personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief -gifts--transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater -at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are -indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation -in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process -of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of -them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in -design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or -historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," -"Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom -Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he -said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he -assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon -his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose -in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the -Mississippi"--and even there it is the river itself and not its human -nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in -Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of -American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never -become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over -that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed -to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his -characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has -sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only -characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded -Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, -he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and -what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: -unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he -says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined -sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the -book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not -attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail -how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in -passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is -perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been -transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. -He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in -consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even -to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of -his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos -of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: -consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear -of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his -imagination. - -We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit -with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the -artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of -influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas -are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's -imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except -for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his -own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own -spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without -development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins--a -fact he naively confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": -"Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost -entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private -venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not -to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. -When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded -by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal -experience. - -Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage -that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson -Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he -had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had -come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It -was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should -write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he -set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and -stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": -we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down -the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, -because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in -nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never -used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems -hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to -write for the _Atlantic_ and it is only then that fresh memories rise in -his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand -for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to -Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A -Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful -for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even -"Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not -spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the -story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in -him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in -another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells -to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written -for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and -slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to _The Atlantic_," says Mr. -Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and -before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to -work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of -it are condemned here and there and yonder." - -Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious -"laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary -sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at -the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on -authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that -to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but -what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose -luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, -especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in -bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy -comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that -indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to -spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no -doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his -matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether -useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too -seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent -assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, -and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign -that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of -those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with -all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a -boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a -journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the -goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low -that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged -him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the -capitalist regime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of -reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system -in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare -himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was -predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 -of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very -last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide -repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: -'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one -imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But -who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from -a lazy line? - -It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can -explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was -subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take -notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make -speeches." That innocent _reclame_ of his, that irresistible passion for -the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to -have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his -inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart -had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For -court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living -that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done -worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four -months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on -the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one -of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was -dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into -which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed -into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been -able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that -role the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" -he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to -be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." -And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that -he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing -quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the -truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent -youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them -into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of -being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of -his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who -certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a -passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the -last man gave out from sheer exhaustion." - -For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his -work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an -increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly -have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We -remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the _Quaker -City_ excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically -meaningless to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless that it -seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in -my mind as a pleasant memory.... An accusing conscience gives me peace -only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it -but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by -the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to -penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the -change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the -Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from -"art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and -duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the -first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier, -"before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river -itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his -task explaining, in that connection, the difference between -"theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just -so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more -so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the -'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has -become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that -descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an -absolutely certain financial success--how repellant it became to him as -time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the -self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell -that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't -have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, -and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and -propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down -went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he -had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief? -"The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to -finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A -Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it. -He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted -child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a -charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the -moment in the approval of his wife. - -We have seen--and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his -arrested development--that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for -literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What -is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in -his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think--over-expressed -it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so--in something he wrote once -of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as -we say, more than for aught else whatever--cared for them with that kind -of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond -votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a -refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect -freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark -Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My -right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write -this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it--no, I mean 1,000,000--next -fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't -have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have -been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost -cynical indifference, of insolence even. - -Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a -significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the -creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, -"his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on -his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far -behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and -it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his -best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his -judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and -certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can -take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything -but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with -such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object -in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had -approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the -craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how -exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!--"possibly the book may -not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." But more -striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven -times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of -preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation -and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously -exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in -that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully. -What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for -"Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he -had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own -fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular -pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them -anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from -the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious -ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of -indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey -of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve -years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his -delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine, -the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying--that spirit which -came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly -gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which -tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the -dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a _rechauffe_ for children, -for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no -doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely -treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the -book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never -known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains -in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship. - -If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine -the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same -time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive -stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession, -have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think -of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was, -says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw.... -On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably -would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence -due?--"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all -but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with -all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent, -prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in -one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get -a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his -"laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform, -and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought -always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice -of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have -said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in -fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his -essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the -_raconteur_ of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is -just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of -mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of -the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a -boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land -because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him -reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had -remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To -tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper -places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at -last--oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control, -to spring that final effect of horror!--there was something worthy of a -man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in -his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable -through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and -training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age -of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, -to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had -Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential -authority, with that old negro _raconteur_, that old pilot of the -Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark -Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his -best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, -the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as -often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had -expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at -least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at -least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: -in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring -masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and -thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass -muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the -others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, -inherited folk-skill--he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist -ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his -_metier_, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever -more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going -his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. -Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual -consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had -remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural -genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with -which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he -found open before him. - -It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life -should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it -now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and -why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The -autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on -hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because -they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore, -that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it -is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either -internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until -it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open -and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary -number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the -surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which -is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the -American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial -success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse, -characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find -him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an -absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885, -at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained -his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you -can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had -"assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he -had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was -the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually -recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote _con -amore_ were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not -only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something -in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he -was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men--that was the -public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business -men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the -phrase, "children of a larger growth"? - -Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he -seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" -could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly -"Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. -But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom -Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he -associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a -publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" -and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic -consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its -real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, -all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious -Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, -though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. -Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is -clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys -through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its -bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de -Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with -love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this -happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says -that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best -book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown -in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to -a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it -on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One -might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a -hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays -which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of -the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift -stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering -itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books -alone--these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering -on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the -ground. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS - - - "Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters." - - ALEXANDER HARVEY. - - - -At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going -through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of -men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a -certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you -would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, -however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is -only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the -guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack -and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact -this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the -imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the -trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another -self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you -perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has -become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in -the twinkling of an eye. - -So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no _real_ morals," he wrote in one -of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and -preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." -Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality -of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but -upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial -morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, -as we have seen, had conformed to a moral regime in which the -profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been -submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the -respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to -depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the -explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self -had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had -concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct -of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that -instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and -manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never -having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to -air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were -black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning -Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant -blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on -it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the -conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it. - -First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he -was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social -regime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious -self urged him to maintain these values and this regime. His unconscious -self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him -in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his -story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the -famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, -he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse -races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with -his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi -diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his -best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two -incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the -symbol of Mark Twain himself. - -Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged -on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was -always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the -floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by -apprehensions--badgered, harassed"--and let us add Mr. Paine's -adjectives--"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset," -till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent -the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he -always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his -will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant, -fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental -desire pointed him just the other way? - -Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had -submerged himself in the role of the husband, the father, the neighbor, -the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His -absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development -of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain -was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house -was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own -drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent -caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the -householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one -observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting -against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being -"bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and -tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and -wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." -Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or -getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results -too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain -became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only -just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, -he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so -extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which -developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one -of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and -the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with -her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have -been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not -qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone -who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose -myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which -the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other -caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old -Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic -protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. -Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's -constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found -in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely -inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. -We can see from this that although his conscious life had been -overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, -his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature. - -And how can we explain the fervor with which this comrade of -Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society, this husband of that -"heavenly whiteness," Mrs. Clemens, jots in his note-book observations -like the following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven consists -mainly of undesirable persons"? How can we explain that intemperate, -that vehement, that furious obsession of animosity against the novels of -Jane, Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of the primness -and priggishness of his own _entourage_? I should go even further, I -should be even more specific, than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark -Twain's literary mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had -regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated him socially; -Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and Mark Twain, the candidate for -gentility, had been over-flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written -to this father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully accepted -classic until you have been dead one hundred years--it is the fate of -the Shakespeares of all genuine professions--but then your books will be -as common as Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the -encyclopedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation unknown; -but he was personally acquainted with Howells.'" We know, as a matter of -fact, that he delighted in the delicacy of Howells's mind and language. -But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything else in Mark Twain's -literary horizon. We can say, with all the more certainty because he -"detested" novels in general, that if Howells's novels had been written -by any one else than his friend and his mentor he would have ignored -them as he ignored all other "artistic" writing, he would even have -despised them as he despised all insipid writing. In short, this taste -was a product of personal affection and gratitude; it was precisely on a -par with his attitude toward the provincial social daintinesses of his -wife. And in both cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had -accepted these alien standards that had been imposed upon him, his -unconscious self revolted against them. "I never saw a woman so hard to -please," he writes in 1875, "about things she doesn't know anything -about." Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to his wife's -criticism in this is tenderly playful, as always." But what a multitude -of dark secrets that tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious -self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that, enough to show how -strict was the censorship he had accepted. It cannot express itself -directly; consequently, like a child who, desiring to strike its -teacher, stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumulated -bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters such characteristic -aphorisms as "Heaven for climate, hell for society," we see the -repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Reverend -Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, -and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, "a -companionship which to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he -roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried -self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a -prime passion who had even taken Jane Austen as a model. - -We know the constraint to which he submitted as regards religious -observances. "And once or twice," he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when -the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked -on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter animus that lies -behind his comical complaint of George W. Cable, when the two were -together on a lecture tour?--"You will never, never know, never divine, -guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made -until you come to know and study Cable daily and hourly.... He has -taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and -troublesome ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have seen, he spoke -of himself in public as a Presbyterian, as "Twitchell's parishioner." -His buried self redressed the balance in a passionate admiration for -Robert Ingersoll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the books," -he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devouring them--they have found a -hungry place, and they content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in -fact, were the books he loved best? We find him reading Andrew D. -White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's "European Morals" and similar -books of a rationalistic tendency. But his favorite authors--after -Voltaire, whom he had read as a pilot--were Pepys, Suetonius and -Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's "Memoirs" he said he had read twenty times, -and we gather that he almost learned by heart Suetonius's record of "the -cruelties and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he take such -passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in writers who had so freely -"spoken out." Hear what he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is -Man?"--"Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. -For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I -ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other -difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." And when -at last he did publish it, anonymously, it was with this foreword: -"Every thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and accepted as -unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, -kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (_and -could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have not -I published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no -other." There we see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which -his creative self was laboring. One can easily understand his love for -Saint-Simon and Casanova and why, in private, he was perpetually -praising their "unrestrained frankness." - -And is there any other explanation of his "Elizabethan breadth of -parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses that he sometimes blushed over Mark -Twain's letters, that there were some which, to the very day when he -wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear to reread. -Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over -Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he -would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold -fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism -was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been -permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to -ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words. -Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the -time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the -English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and -assembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could -not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the -riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he -poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of -a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at -a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity -among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its title, -has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard -one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that -are current in every New York publishing house? - -In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful -ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through -the censorship his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the -unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait -for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the -_outre_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia -Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark -Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon -upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and -they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and -thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it -from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily -search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and -oblige it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in -order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they -were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort -of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the -texture of Mark Twain's writings. - -For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through -with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In -the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish. -In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been -prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or -by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censorship -which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some -contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, -are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In -such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully -satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a -compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two -railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms -of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud -has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any -reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we -are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious -bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those -embarrassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that -express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies -wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon -which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or -rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this -process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, -certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am -writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some -manuscripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On -these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be -straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it." -When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead -Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was -frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote -his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about -himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia -of his soul. - -Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, -for the time being, free of his censorship. That he wrote at least the -first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is -proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the -book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American -Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he -wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine. -Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly -expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to -be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that -never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion -mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself -once more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had passed, in -short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed -were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that -sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such -times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all -sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits -of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible -animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort -on the part of his suppressed self to assert its supremacy in a -propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved -abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to -literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in -the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally -been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian -monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant -farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce -to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing -circumstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but -two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed -the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately. -That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed -further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it -stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of -passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry -satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, -that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far -relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the -battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our -very eyes. - -Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of -"wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is -surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the -celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward -J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the -Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they -made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the -celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this -Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him. - -Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate -of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is -the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by -the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note -the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the -unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amusement of his neighbors is -a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu -of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. - -This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead -Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with -Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly assured us that an -author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that -Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he -continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A -Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply -another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the -same fashion. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been -privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement--a calendar, -with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; -appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and -fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful -of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But -irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for -it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided -without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson -was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt -for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him -before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a -genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed -here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets -generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his -scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't -it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired -Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it -possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was -picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him? -Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures -Pudd'nhead out-manoeuvring the village folk and triumphing over them -in the end. - -Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame -and position enabled him to override the censorship and speak with more -or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says -Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally -and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were -never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place. -For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of -self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and -that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one -but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole -community--of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by -leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield -and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted -incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens," -the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with all -those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his -true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and -admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it--it was -these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon -him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the passing stranger who -took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their -hypocrisy. "I passed through your town at a certain time, and received a -deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in -the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the -misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, -the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to -recognize its divinity? - -Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the -"wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the -desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself -in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the -suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells -about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body -"a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, -far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no -chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale -of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of -a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old -castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into -subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation -for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that. -As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American -Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age," -who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after -one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his -own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful -claimant to the great title of nobility, living in exile among those -fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure -projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business -life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet -forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true -rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark -Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to -account for his constant preoccupation with this idea. - -Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his -old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that -flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and -fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have -been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in -himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese -Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the -usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle -perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and -"The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that constitutes "The Prince -and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the role of the -beggar-boy--Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn -himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the -Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically -slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of -incompatibles bound together in one flesh--the Extraordinary Twins, the -"good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad" -boy of whom society disapproves--how many of Mark Twain's stories and -anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!--does he -not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history -of his life? - -We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was -expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become -owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the -poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American -progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur," -the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the -discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more -wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been -discussing, however, we can see that while the censorship had been -sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his -unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to -cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his -saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like -Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant," -thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where -"prosperity and position constitute rank." Here, as in the malevolent, -Mephistophelian "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we -perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save -his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained -fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his -finger-print invention--otherwise he would find something better to do -than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how -could you expect a young English snob to know anything about democracy? -That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his -readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would -know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the -great American game of bluff they would have to forgive _him_! As long -as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short, -he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the -public in the hollow of his hand, knew it. - -It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand -the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn." -Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little -boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let -himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the -writing and the fate of this book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to -have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the -publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain! -Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pass the -censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an -irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this -world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization. -That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity -we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting -to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons -attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to -find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he -can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive! -Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness -are so many shields behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of -the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his -unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical -passages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the -mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by -the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has -the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: -"There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The -withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the -sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in -his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism -in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have -appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the -lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial -detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation. -"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," -says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable -on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!--that raft and that -river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole -unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds -and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of -the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"? -Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was -not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright, -shining arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is -because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that -gave it its momentum. - -Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was -intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the role of a demiurge, in -fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and -misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for -this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed! -Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs, -petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the -domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those -second parents who had taken the place of his first--we have to thank -it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and -general revolt of Huckleberry Finn: - - "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work; - it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The - widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them - ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every - morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; - she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them - blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem - to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten - nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around - anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar door for--well, it - 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and - sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in - there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The - widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits - up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't - stand it." - - "Well, everybody does that way, Huck." - - "Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I - can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub - comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that - way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in - a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. - Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got - to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to - git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder - wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she - wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before - folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now - these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I - ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...." - -This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in the circus. You see -what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR - - - "To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is - nobler and less trouble." - - _Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._ - - -And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant -Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he -was in revolt against a role which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust -upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc" -anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark -Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous -writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other -than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, -we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic -development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this -career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that -found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his -decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious -and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige -had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark -Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and -what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and -at the same time achieved such ample material rewards. - -It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we -have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; -and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency -who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a -humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he -was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of -Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. -Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, -sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of -chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous -cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society -required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems -to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a -distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition--the -battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it -seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, -when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is -the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind -it." - -Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark -Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that -in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found -that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his -diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do _hate_ to go -back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from -mining. "We fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada -as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman -say, the other day, that it was the 'd----dest country under the -sun'--and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never -rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green -thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the -purest--most unadulterated and uncompromising--_sand_." And as with the -setting--so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, -"the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on -him": more than once he found it necessary--this young man of -twenty-eight--"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat -Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs -and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." -That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own -testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d----n San Francisco style -of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made -his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands--"God, what a contrast with -California and the Washoe"!--ever sweet and blessed in his memory. -Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was -this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also -call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which -also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of -his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he -was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was -always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill -his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr. -Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic -waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of -the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam -swear."--Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was -living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation. - -Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of -pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life. -It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with -domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that -sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as -we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was, -nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or -satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were -civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom -civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable -avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which -their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, -they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were -blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, -that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children -were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how -hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining -population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex -tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single -monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which -kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse -in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually -impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept -a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to -conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask -of a rough good-fellowship that found expression mainly in the nervously -and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the -gambling-hell. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which -peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, -quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the very pick and choice of -the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing -It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or -decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed -hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon -the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof -of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed. - -Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that -life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the -fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The -gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an -outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of -masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the -intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the -human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering -one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps -the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was -almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the -day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so -common--that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the -newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his -old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated -duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of -chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser -degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the -pioneers? - -But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that -individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and -preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering -itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but, -victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not -withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from -openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already -pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers -in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were -always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in -calling a relief from restraint. - -We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were -subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the -most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most -complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances -where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most -general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was -the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a -life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the -necessity of making money, of succeeding--the same impulse had brought -him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain -was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from -attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised -and because to have done so would have required just those expressions -of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other -hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of -all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those -outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his -companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never -"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged -physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. -"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty -years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have -lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still -retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that -would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out -into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in -the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his -instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had -to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a -life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he -became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of -individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship of public -opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada. - -Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some -kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, -since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, -had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the -artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, -far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark -Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in -order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he -acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his -individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, -his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different" -or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how -urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society -where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself -by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his -profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing -at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see -from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of -his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was -always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his -humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men -laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short, -of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief -in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those -acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of -consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious -jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will -hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he -could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those -conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this -vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time -keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming -his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a -relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose -investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, -the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of -expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic -effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke -or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely -safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist -in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of -those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of -one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than -the editors had spoken each of the other")--his comrades were able, -without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own -exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred -and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship -that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain -himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to -maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the -position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader. - -For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular -ferocity. The very titles of his Western I sketches reveal their general -character: "The Dutch Nick Massacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing -Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Caesar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in -the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his -labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the -doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the -phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to -kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead -Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape -hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It -began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a -special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; -but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was -"unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, -the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, -in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt -officials--we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own -painfully honest brother Orion--were frankly afraid of him. "He was very -far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any -way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even -from trying to be a humorist! - -Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik -Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, -found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all -that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down -upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not -enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man -with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same -way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own -childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of -Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged -by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his -antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of -satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest -of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in -him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his -pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated -and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike -he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is -the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in -corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of -things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not -seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was -an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, -their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change -things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a -counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very -moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive -instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to -express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have -led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an -end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as -human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired -Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief -they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could -not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been -compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He -had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a -campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine -says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As -a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote -criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the -result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco -papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a -correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we -are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long -restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the -"humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in -California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from -expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in -short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to -remain a humorist. - -In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover -the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who -found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter -of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no -value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same -trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." -Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he -had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps -we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor -consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't -know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as -surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists -of a sort who lack the courage to admit it. - -Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I -say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to -carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of _The Galaxy,_ to -which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct -a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" -his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a -humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have -already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the -pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the -rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business -men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. -The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for -ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national -demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by -Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at -last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact. - -I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the -Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of -Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly -homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we -have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile -because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or -restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us -feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile _because_! -In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The -"cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all -his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and -as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far -from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in -these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and -even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark -Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches -in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, -lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small -harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances -of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; -but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, -all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the -same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than -the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's -humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the -same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is -to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" -that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us -from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to -murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from -the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us -to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a -phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the -last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is -the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the -demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he -made upon his environment, had become, _pari passu_, progressively more -stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as -barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why -perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment -favorable for a regime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who -has risen," the typical American, himself a business man? - -Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of -succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but -complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the -stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general -"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been -characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation -was practically organized--by a sort of common consent--on the plan of -a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed -to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and aesthetic -development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised -the success of the business regime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark -Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to -the efficiency of this business regime, because it helped to maintain -the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as -it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the -Western pioneer. - -As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business -man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the -"strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an -aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he -find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way -and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an -aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, -diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the -creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic -cooperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts -for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that -expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." -Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional -freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a -retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: -consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, -confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On -the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, -everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, -reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and -responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual -and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor -does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought--and -especially irreverent toward them!--when they gave him a seat below the -salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and -absurd everything of a spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual nature the -recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the -smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as -we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at -antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an -infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being. -That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a -hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the -spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, -involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader -to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional -stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all -these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure -in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much -as the pioneer. - -Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether -they corroborate this argument. - -In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself -seated directly behind a young girl: - - How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she - would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own - thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer - pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy - dreams,--no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit - still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of - a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young - figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the - gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, - tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy - cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy - rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and - so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did - mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red - lips parted, and out leaped her thought,--and with such a - guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just _know_ - I've got five hundred fleas on me!" - -This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its -tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all -the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them -so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in -hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, -prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting -into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a -pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by -a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself -evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no -longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a -butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in -the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to -his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions. - -Another example, the famous "oesophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph -of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story": - - It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The - lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, - hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge - provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that - have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; - the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow - flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep - of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous - flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty - sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; - everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of - God. - -We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury -of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its -various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most -careless reader will accept the oesophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's -sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation -of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and -thus divert the reader's feeling for it. - -To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life -of the man with an eye single to the main chance--that, one would almost -say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one -of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house -down in order to roast his pig--he destroys, that is to say, an entire -complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single -sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are -manifestations of just that personal, aesthetic or moral distinction -which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish. -Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on -General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous -assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the -human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of -the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success -of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the -final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a -democratic regime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition -of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the -fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a -business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is, -however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious -schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," -says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather -hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him -into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark -Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that -in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for -this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook -his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To -exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our -humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from -any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be -abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" -was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of -beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd -pioneer business man. - -How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The -Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological -moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of -industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become -obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it -was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe! -Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's -own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything -of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were -ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be -ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual -development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that -would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too -costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not -only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate -pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as -Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and -all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind -were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, -yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was -notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial -philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in -civilization, of modern America. "I find your people--your best people, -I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only -talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's -novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there -seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in -their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of -the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of -cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The -Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's "Leaves of -Grass," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one -hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Grass," -having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its -whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that -is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the -individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a -commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true -spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring -every traveling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure of -its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so -far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and -the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far -as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing -satisfaction of Americans with a banker's paradise in which, as long as -it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled. - -So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. I -think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought -him. And are we not already in a position to see why the role of -humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, -why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own -development? - -Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of -the artist. It meant the suppression of his aesthetic desires, the -degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How -can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end -becoming the victim of his own habit? - -I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved -the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and -delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love -for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for -charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the -Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish -knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands -on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing -something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business -man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation -of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he -continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more -advanced aesthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one -of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the -irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: -one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually -"taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty -becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of -art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven." -In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions -of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul. -Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective -coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by -stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself -a scarred child. - -He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day -come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal -humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was -satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great -purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of -which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was -he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he -lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the -"sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his -proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of -moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual -position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating -stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the -indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the -energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became -but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his -"high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by -saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as -fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of -harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that -world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked -everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an -endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that -equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out -of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can -appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after -all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief -life-saver." - - - - -CHAPTER X - -LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN - - - "No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence - of ladies." - - _A Double-Barrelled Detective Story_. - - -"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your -works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political -tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain -himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant -intention of Mark Twain's genius, the role which he was, if one may say -so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. -Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with -Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, -Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, -that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him -thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that -extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance -of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the -wish for the deed? - -What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds -up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the -inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is -Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the -obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Moliere holding up to the measure -on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, -intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the -intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism -of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is -embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely -conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain -cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he -did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government -his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly -speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and -government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil -community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view -of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes -for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the -fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? -Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social -life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of -our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own -humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the -support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities -and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw -bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else -begin." - -It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be -sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his -nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, -despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, -he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand -for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so -involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he -could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his -friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to -him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen -that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great -impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even -feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the -wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead -of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and -even flattered it. - -If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to -be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the -puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author -of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediaevalism of -sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to -divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his -generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric -clay-bank: many of the vertebrae are missing, other parts have crumbled -away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. -But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are -beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in -assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills -out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been. - -When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small -change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty -aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos -of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see -that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he -says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity -toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct -without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing -from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his -father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's -a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He -delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms -as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after -to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who -is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as -impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at -night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One -was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't -say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was -interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle -Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and -it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of -interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the -continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages -indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior -cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the -satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can -substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has -abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark -Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his -instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, -political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in -private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave -conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made -progress--the first progress in 'ages and ages'--colossal progress. In -what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which -add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But -the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The -materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that -there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was -before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is -a vast change (due to them) in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and -all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme -ideal--all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations -named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the -world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This -lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, -dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of -Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that -he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the -great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, -that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his -friends were the unconscious agents of the business regime, bent upon -deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have -seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering? - -Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was -perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed -into the role that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what -did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country -some of these days when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the -spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich -writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark -Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary -confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the -financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path -of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a -brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read -'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a -cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked -on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those -days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 -or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, -excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to -eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry -Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by -the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great -centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. -If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have -been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested -for his first important book--"The New Pilgrim's Progress"--was regarded -in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing -Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only -when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed -to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but -loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same -gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: -it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose -"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is -obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to -attack them? - -His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it -is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," -that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the -frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a -sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the -readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a -friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going -to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not -going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make -trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he -could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky -note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, -that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of -the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" -lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the -case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not -noticing these little spots on the American sun? - -In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems -frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen -that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief -embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been -the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of -speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are -all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and -generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and -politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there -are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed -out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly -animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact -the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand -old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its -devasting irony about every American institution save family -life--Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education -and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's -final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet -the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth -lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain -number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to -redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so--for the story -was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford--by -making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up -young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the -softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, -for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had -the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? -"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but -had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He -welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint -authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a -return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; -Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the -sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one -might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the -West. - -Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an -accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was -too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this -earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted -Hadleyburg"--not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever -again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of -industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great -Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as -"a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we -know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had -once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, -"that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too -often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that -having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels -backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he -feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the -seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth -century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century -France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The -Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again -the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a -contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the -"Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark -Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King -Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on -corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he -not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who -are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's -biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, -begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form -that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to -estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, -in his private memoranda--"do right and you will be conspicuous." - -Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's -intention and failure in his predestined role, the "Connecticut Yankee" -itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the -most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. -Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in -writing it. - -What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he -says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for -America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their -sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to -me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good -intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level -of manhood in turn." - -No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have -blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of -him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. -Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating -gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always -have been slightly irritating--he was irritating even at home, and how -much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to -dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw -red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon -General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, -an attack upon America _and_ upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark -Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book -as the publisher of General Grant, upon his _amour-propre_ as the -countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like -a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a -typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're -another!"--just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul -Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to -put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis -and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of -the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a -frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could -not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities -like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't -tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all -that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered -both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole -English race, indeed, to come and knock them off. - -Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a -satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in -the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, -unconsciously, into a sort of _bouleversement_ of all his actual -personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds -himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up -the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher -level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but -to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In -short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to -do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee -mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours -ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of -the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were -sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages. - -Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's -genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did -not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle -years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his -letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was -absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can -see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A -Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old -Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and -Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to -Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and -thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear -date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my -word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there -was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I -to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; -there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this -progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of -Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that -he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he -proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to -those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something -rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a -land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being -possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up -to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the -inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average -rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous -wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the -seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about -that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected -from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it -might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of -space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he -calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there -is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace--_the approval of -his neighbors and the public_. And perhaps there is something which he -dreads more than he dreads pain--the _disapproval_ of his neighbors and -the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the -disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their -approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous -letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by -deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only -wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in -even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated -classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always -hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to -instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can -get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to -"pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its -objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles -of simple folk! They are the most successful of all. - -The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark -Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection -and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he -records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here -if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. -Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its -institutions"--its institutions, observe--"its fair rural aspects, he -had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; -against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so -admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons -for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed -him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first -English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many -of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English -readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark -Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class -of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that -Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful -heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? -But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, -as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid -its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their -hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, -merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately -desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have -already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of -this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was -this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely -personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in -reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark -that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was -his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public -figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, -in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his -responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of -humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with -him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was -measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without -hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like -the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people -immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the -situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford -neighbors, who had taken him into _their_ hearts and homes?--that was -the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could -not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned -enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize--he was -boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to -satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize -not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won. - -Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine -tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was -badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was -highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the -"Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business -with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author, -we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the -publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be -popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have -been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the -top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the -exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial -pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make -King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?-- -"Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck -and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest -field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the -English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting -the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the -great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks -neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he -wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain -had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the -spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the -magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, -less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also. - -"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it." -Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that -remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable -only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long -deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom -Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be -read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find -him adding: "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to -the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book -is to be for boys and girls." Tell the truth or trump--but get the -trick! - -Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal -processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, -that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success -and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two -letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who -was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive -feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, -as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings -and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable -way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for -his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody -contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, -Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to _mail_ this letter; he understands -that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no -harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a -volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his -crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he -would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one -writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a -very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot -embers in it here and there." - -Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask -himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he -accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the -priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the -accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and -cannot employ it. - -Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark -Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he -finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to -dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. -To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the -premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the -most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, -that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would -have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been -arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those - illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, - obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the - Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war - into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all - respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I - taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to - modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. - MARK. - - DEAR COLONEL--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a - lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK. - -And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that -he announced he was going to show it to the Czar: - - To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should - be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the - illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing - but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war - with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty - centuries history will not get done admiring these men who - attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved - it. MARK TWAIN. - -Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful -fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To -Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' -stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had -told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. -'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up -and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. -'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men -can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' -He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he -was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions -and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! -And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in -this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment -to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible -playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars -up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to -support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation." - -Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain -was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes -to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far -more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was -always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to -America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his -aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him -a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious -wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into -the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir -in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position -carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders -to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal -ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, -was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of -reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who -appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. -"The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more -intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the -affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and -punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure -punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a -cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts -which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all -respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I -think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, -boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect -upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or -Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an -assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of -"brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most -pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer. - -This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the -Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who -attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other -hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what -everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society -Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but -monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who -took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in -actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it -appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, -as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the -nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, -the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could -not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the -spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, -for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the -spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was -personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. -Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to -print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion -behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was -the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents -Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by -disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered -the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own -genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a -whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold -quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding. - -Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old -age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared -to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's -biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled -satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an -impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those -merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance -upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him -to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer -interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his -childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; -he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of -his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he -imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. -He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought -in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, -"needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have -done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we -see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and -Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. -Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he -never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The -religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he -meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't -he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those -theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes -about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from -his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his -environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think -of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make -people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with -infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to -curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes -in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, -in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells -Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs -and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. -2006--which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment -of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," -saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so -far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs -one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the -trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the -publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk. - -Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered -life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had -found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth -and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The -absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous -conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's -pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven -is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote -in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he -dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a -single feature in it that he _actually values_. It consists--utterly -and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on -the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do -not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are -singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about -two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in -a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not -many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have -variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you -have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented -a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is -like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too -rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the -tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, -in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent -impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of -"Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, -something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the -civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the -illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what -civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in -his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a -world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen -it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That -Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, -"until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating -sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut -Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, -and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted -nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim -of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of -life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol -promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that -is pathology. - -Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was -always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he -oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture -of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification -or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the -satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an -ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, -never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also -that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the -works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 -Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. -Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a -man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and -looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a -billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it -with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might -say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect -it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have -the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the -picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is -able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple -contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never -completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they -invariably led into this _cul-de-sac_. If life is really futile, then -writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make -life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility -is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it -might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it _is_ -full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present -sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never -attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in -the air. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -MUSTERED OUT - - - "... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the - others were all still asleep." DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI. - - -And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly -liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him -and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his -defeat. - -"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday -speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe -no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a -time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your -term, well or less well, and you are mustered out." - -What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon -his life? - -"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," -"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived -in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the -public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we -print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries -and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot -had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once -and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the -creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and -he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write -frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of -Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you -ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose -opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic -naivete of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought -or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential -priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross -and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, -immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt -contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your -immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined -to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found -out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is -true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence -of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so -doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far -from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering -forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of -youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; -you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of -the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain -thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out." - -His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy -years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and -awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have -oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon -your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck -Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with -Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in -this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has -become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, -unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant -growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in -matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of -national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches -now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played -this role in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the -clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain -perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": -the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world -as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd -it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly -fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous -nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the -more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the -vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon -the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of -the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any -one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general -spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who -said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize -that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for -the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient -earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything -essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was -always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of -thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three -times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a -watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the -farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the -gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own -career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the -sort of courage he described in his story "Luck." - -"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so -little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak -out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he -continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same -seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor -(privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my -conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. -There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal -to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said -some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will -not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did -he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise -we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not -rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long -habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double -personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to -redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and -comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had -kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not -sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had -kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of -the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old -imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long -deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How -it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a -little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark -Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the -truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week -he found that he no longer had the strength. - -Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to -Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing -for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and -have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance -to write a book without reserves--a book which should take account of no -one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, -illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my -heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I -judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is -under way, now, and it _is_ a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book -was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing -it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his -desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil -upon the passion that possessed him. At once this craving reasserted -itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?" -He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his -friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he -felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire -still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind -on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a -mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path -out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he -writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden -emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous, -however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into -later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men -in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him": -there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth -now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth--anything that it would -hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored -the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother -Orion to write an autobiography that would spare nobody's feelings and -would let all the cats out of the bag: "Simply tell your story to -yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing," he -had told him. Let Orion do it! we can almost hear him whispering to -himself; and Orion had done it. "It wrung my heart," wrote Mr. Howells -of that astounding manuscript, "and I felt haggard after I had finished -it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had -found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was -himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as -Mr. Paine tells us, "a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even -his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down." To write such -a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed -what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for -autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for -confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to -redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something -unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who -spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in -the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of -himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and -plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be -mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom," -he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, -"because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with -theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; -you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm -and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's -indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells, -who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really -indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast -advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against -the sluice-gates of a human soul? - -At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to -be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his -autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he -has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter--the passage is to -be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my -seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six -hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published -in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish -and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall -continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It -is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some -folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons -mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is -something awful." - -You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has -been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a -debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things -about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to -shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about -her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three -"playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but -still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and -Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright -campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in -Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to -exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of -humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the -use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain -universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human -soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that -whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and -space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are -so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your -pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the -mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of -cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going -to have--what magnificently wicked fun! - -You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own -redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book -it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And -what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy -occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are -going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were -published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were -carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in -reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it -in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the -courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his -soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among -the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_ -gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been -dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have -thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I -am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on -paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired -when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I -should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike -them out when I came to revise this book." - -Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark -Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge -Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be -a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the -person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture -to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved -himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what -inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral -slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense -that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to -communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is -Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the -writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will -in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was -incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors. -There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the -Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, -if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of -founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at -Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market -value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; -but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was -not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without -the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his. -"It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is -nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys, -in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the -fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had -a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to -publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge -of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually -shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably -have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was -received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _expose_ of -philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just, -that very generous public verdict--for the book is, in fact, quite -worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain--he must have -felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular role of a -Mephistopheles. - -With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the -repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that -civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen -from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference -and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported -by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm -heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and -oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of -the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable -corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in -South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; -Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the -Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering -the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark -Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of -the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive, -the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of -all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore -this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and -weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it -was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone -aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic -attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following -the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his -book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and -"A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against -bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him. -Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his -"Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the -forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit. -Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who -have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the -sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark -Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, -equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juares and the -volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of -a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level, -and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his -animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and -despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself. - -The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his -energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or -another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly -destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a -will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my -feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on -paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become -definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his -great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can -doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks! -Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he -not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department -on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, -when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, -when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible -passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle -pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day -and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not -a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I -have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end -to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says? -Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human -race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was -it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for -means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian -Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy -frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack -upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the -failure in himself. - -And this failure was the failure of the artist in him. - -Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy -in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life -which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire -except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel, -and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old -masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with -anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it -and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I -have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to -do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort -would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what -had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious -sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The -Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime -creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator -of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an -impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born -artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist -destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in -the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious -he is, even this early, of all aesthetic pretensions! What a fierce -grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the -perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle, -he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all -Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of -tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the -peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a -low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark -Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; -he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is -the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to -desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp -unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously -desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, -why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to -produce only one himself, and that a failure. - -We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative -life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates -nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a -machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the -animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he -said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say -nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of -the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is -astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a -retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could -have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind. -But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging -his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off -the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in -the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults -him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in -Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle -expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to -believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon -knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer--see what Macaulay says! Macaulay, -heaven bless us all!--therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark -Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry -Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the -sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who -asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training -makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce -that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written. -But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel -Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had -not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can -hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to -follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession -revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on -faith. - -How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of -his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently -that it was "like the sky--you can't break through anywhere." How much -it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an -irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to -do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in -Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius -is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its -eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior -circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, -upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his -intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for -the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe -with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and -unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no -outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no -outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a -valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would -have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced -something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, -associations and training. In France he would have produced something -better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and -training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to -Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is -enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we -can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking -reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his -half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as -"large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age. - -Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that -we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order -to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, -destroy us, we embrace them with an _amor fati_, to escape from the -contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside -circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he -wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would -not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave -who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, -finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the -possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself. -The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly -temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, -nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep -emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it -honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the -slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and -thirst for freedom. - -Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential -force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in -Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that -fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If -the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in -fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for -greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued -against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will: -he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a -will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose -regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no -spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where -success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is -a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place -of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the -first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be -weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that -Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it -is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How -well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain! -"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human -being is under training. It is his human environment which influences -his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his -road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself -shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval -he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his -aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He -creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the -way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the -tragedy of it. - -Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark -Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human -mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine -anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a -single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind -from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind -carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which -act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All -day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and -without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 -thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before -his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain -cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as -the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and -controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental -machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of -ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any -help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the -multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen -minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases. -It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite -of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely -independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better -have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark -Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, -chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks -and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't -listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and -wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of -personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, -that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in -these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with -each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book -regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch -inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal -conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the -end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul! - -The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary -psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance. -And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express -through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I -generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not -those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these -"three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me -at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in -the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life -that has been unfolded in these pages. - -"There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being -in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a -living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about -those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought -that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I -am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell -whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night. - -"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to -the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am -always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be -funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only -making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they -commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing -there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house." - -I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas -that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark -Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to -think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought -of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow," -the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself -inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second -dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing -self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream -worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always -"trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has -lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great -surrender. - -Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment -when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda -packet: - -"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which -the title-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of -this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The -other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon -him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at -me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out -of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't -want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always -expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'" - -No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have -had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; -but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for -good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess -alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity -of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said -Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks -and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have -ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born -artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that -he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be -"original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship -even over his neckties--the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, -has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily! - -And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about -on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most -ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, -the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by -all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic -sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the -end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an -illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the -creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those -three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of -conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is -the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own -conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He -was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that -has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for -missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says -John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, -"who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of -things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the -end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability -begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new -turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces -of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confreres -have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask -yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and -walk the stage as poets do. - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42225.txt or 42225.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/2/2/42225/ - -Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org -(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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