as this and no bare outline of Mr. Brooks’s argument could afford to be
less uncompromising, for he himself is uncompromising in his general
arraignment of the industrial civilization and the uncompleted culture
which could hold Mark Twain down and of the qualities in his character
which allowed him to be held. That it is an arraignment, however, and
exhibits instances of special pleading and a definite animus must be
admitted even by those who, like myself, agree that the picture here
drawn of our greatest humourist is substantially accurate as well
as brilliant. Let me cite some examples. Mark Twain once proposed a
conundrum, “Why am I like the Pacific Ocean?” and himself answered it:
“I don’t know. I was just asking for information.” “If he had not had
a certain sense of colossal force,” comments Mr. Brooks, “it would
never have occurred to him, however humorously, to compare ... his
magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean.” It will not do to take the
commentator here as seriously as he takes Mark Twain. Again, speaking
of the instinct for protective coloration which led Mark Twain, with
the other humorists, to adopt a pen-name, Mr. Brooks finds it an
“interesting coincidence that ‘Mark Twain,’ in the pilot’s vocabulary,
implied ‘safe water.’” Interesting indeed, but totally insignificant,
though Mr. Brooks by mentioning it makes it look like a tiny aspersion
on Mark Twain’s courage. And once more, this passage with regard to
_Huckleberry Finn_, in which for once its author seems to Mr. Brooks
to have slipped out of the silken net of which Mrs. Clemens held the
drawstrings and the golden cage to which Mr. Howells held the key,
and floated freely and gloriously down the Mississippi on a raft,
essentially disguised as the joyful, illiterate, vagabond Huck. “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!” With the aid
of psychoanalysis one can find motives for any burst of mirth, but
this explanation singularly recalls O. Henry’s remark about a certain
husband whose wife was trying to provoke him to beat her so they could
have the fun and luxury of making up: “Many ideas were far from his
mind, but the farthest was the idea of beating his wife.”
One thing that makes me suspect at times the general drift of
Mr. Brooks’s argument is that a good many of the details of his
psychoanalyzing look suspicious. Read in cold blood the account of
the effect upon Mark Twain’s subsequent life of his promises to his
mother on the occasion of his father’s death: “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 peccadilloes, 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 meagre 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 his 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!” Are eleven-year-old boys, even boys of genius, really
ever made over so sharply as this? Mr. Brooks says “we feel with
irresistible certitude that Mark Twain’s fate was once for all decided
there.” I wonder if this is not the “irresistible certitude” of those
romancers and evangelists who believe in instantaneous and irrevocable
conversions. Barbarous and dangerous a thing as it is for parents to
exact promises from their children under the pressure of bitter events,
still it is rarely as bad as all that.
The point is strained again when Mr. Brooks digs around the roots
of Mark Twain’s “obsession of animosity against the novels of Jane
Austen” and traces it to an “indirect venting of his hatred of the
primness and priggishness of his own _entourage_.” More specifically,
in his submerged self he hated his wife and Howells. “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 Rev. 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
[his wife’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.” Now, of course, when the psychoanalytic
hunt is on it seems unsubtle and unsympathetic to object, with common
sense, that our antipathies are often accidental and that often enough
we whimsically specialize in this or that antipathy, seeing how many
angles we can hate it from, in how many slashing phrases we can utter
a distaste which has grown into a habit that is positively a delight.
But even if we do not lean too heavily on common sense and are merely
rival psychoanalysts we must still admit that in Freud’s house are many
mansions and that every genius analyzed has so many roots each of them
may look like the tap-root, though only one can actually be.
Without for a moment denying Mr. Brooks the credit of being the first
critic to dig importantly about the roots of an American man of
genius, and indeed of making clear much that was not clear before,
I still think he has reduced Mark Twain too neatly to the dualistic
formula. For all this critic’s learning and research and penetration,
he does not quite give the effect of having been and seen entirely
around the subject of his study. Just in proportion as Mark Twain was
stupendously casual, as wasteful as nature in his processes, not always
purposive at all but a rioter in whims and unprophesiable explosions,
an amateur of the drifting life, Mr. Brooks appears to have missed
him, because he misses there what he conceives to be “the mind of the
mature artist, which is all of a single flood, all poise, all natural
control.” As in his earlier study of John Addington Symonds, Mr.
Brooks is rigorously monistic—almost monotheistic—in his conception
of the creative life, so rigorously that he has come to see any sort
of dualism in an artist’s nature as not only the chief of tragedies
but indeed as the chief of sins against his function and destiny.
Ibsen felt that way about it and so did Milton on somewhat different
grounds, but Molière and Shakespeare, if they had thought much about
the matter, would pretty certainly have laid the emphasis much nearer
the tragedy than the sin. And even whatever tragic aspect there might
be would be somewhat relieved for them, I suspect, as _King Lear_ by
its poetry, by such an abundance of life as Mark Twain had and tasted.
Is it merely being deceived by quantity to feel that Mr. Brooks, so
avidly exigent as regards quality, limits too narrowly his judgments
as regards the creative process and its achievements, and by despising
quantity overlooks some quality too? At least I am persuaded that Mr.
Brooks has taken the vast figure of Mark Twain, both fact and myth, and
has recreated it too near his own image, making the Mark Twain of his
re-creation suffer more both in his submerged and his dominant selves
than the originally created Mark Twain did by reason of the turbulent
confusion of his career. Mr. Brooks, sparer, more clear-cut, more
conscious, would thus have suffered if _he_ had walked such a fraying
path.
If I take too many exceptions to this account of the, “ordeal” of
Mark Twain it is because I believe it to be a book worthy the most
scrupulous consideration. Side by side with the vulgar myth of Mark
Twain I foresee that this interpretation of him will take its place
for a long time to come, correcting the other, pleasing the judicious
by its general truthfulness and its felicitous language, even invading
the textbooks and becoming classic. I think it should do these things,
but I hope it will also be perceived to be, something after the manner
of, say, Voltaire’s _Lettres Anglaises_, a clever tract, another
resounding shot in the warfare which Mr. Brooks is waging on behalf of
the leadership of letters. Herein he has set forth the career of a man
of letters who should have been leader and was not, with implications
on every vivid page as to why and how others may take warnings from
his failure. “Has the American writer of today the same excuse for
missing his vocation?” Mr. Brooks concludes. “‘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 yourself whether the
hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as
poets do.”
III. TWO NOTES ON YOUTH
THE RELEASE OF YOUTH
John Fiske perceived that human history has been greatly affected
by the fact that man has a longer infancy than the other animals. A
creature which grows to its full stature and faculties in a few hours
or weeks or months or even years has not the same opportunity to travel
far in knowledge or to build its intelligence upon observations and
conclusions as has the creature which normally matures through at least
a score of years. There still remains to be studied the effect upon
mankind of the deliberate prolongation of infancy which, particularly
in Europe and America, has been going on for something over a century.
Perhaps it should be called less a prolongation of infancy than a
discovery that infancy actually lasts longer than had been realized.
The social effect is much the same. In the eighteenth century the
unproductive and acquisitive period of infancy for boys rarely lasted
beyond twenty years, even for those who were trained at the colleges
and universities. For the same class in the twentieth century—a class
now proportionately larger than then—a period of twenty-five years is
nearer the average. The shift is even more marked as regards girls, who
a hundred years ago were likely to be married at seventeen or eighteen
but who now are quite likely to remain unmarried till twenty-five,
and very many, of course, till later. What has become of those years
of human life thus lost to adult society, or at least diverted to new
purposes?
It will not do to answer that such years of youth have been offset
by the years added at the end of life through the advance of hygiene
and medicine. Even if the total number were the same—and there are no
figures to prove or to disprove it—there would still be an incalculable
difference in quality. Consider the matter in a simple biological
aspect. The postponement of marriage has reduced the number of children
born, and has therefore released for other functions a vast amount
of human energy once devoted by very young women to gestation and
lactation. Anyone who has had occasion to observe a group of girls in
the schools and colleges of this generation knows how tremendous is the
store of surplus energy for which there is no biological outlet and
which too often fails to be sublimated as it might well be into other
forms of service. The quantity of such energy which the war showed
to be in reserve should not have been a surprise to the teachers or
observers of youth. No more should it have been a surprise that those
who were thought of as mere boys should have suddenly and successfully
taken up heavier labours and larger responsibilities than they had
known before. The energy had been all the time in existence, though
it had been spent on study or sports or dissipation. Thousands and
thousands of years had instructed the race to give about so many years
and about so much energy to youth, and the arbitrary customs of a
century could not accomplish anything but the most superficial changes.
The war, which wasted and worse than wasted human riches, almost
certainly threw away a larger treasury of youth than any previous
generation could have done, for the reason that there was more youth to
throw away.
Surely the splendour of modern life, its variety and glitter and
colour and movement, capable even of blinding men now and then to the
drabness of its machine-processes, must have been due in part to the
prolongation of infancy. There have been longer hours for play and
more ways of playing: new games, new dances, new contests of speed and
strength and dexterity, and in America especially an increasing return
to the mimic wild life of the summer camp. What, among other things,
peace must be made to give back is that abundance of youth. We need
no increase of the birth-rate to absorb the energy of the girls; we
need no new wars to waste the energy of the boys. We need instead to
recognize this precious asset and to employ it. The first step should
be to distribute the fulness of life among more boys and girls than had
it before the war, when it belonged to a too narrow privileged class.
The next should be to civilize it, not by cramping and restraining
its activities but by associating them with thought and passion and
beauty. In how many quarters of the world have athletics, the natural
expression of the release of youth, been viewed as sheer rowdyism or
at best as squandered power! But, viewed more largely, athletics must
appear the physical symbol of the energy which the race has latterly
been hoarding. Not athletics merely but the thing thereby symbolized
must be drawn into the general current of existence. It means the
enlargement of youth’s pleasure, the evocation of its deeper thought
and passion, the development of its capacities. And of course whatever
enriches youth in time enriches all society.
YOUTH IS ALWAYS RIGHT
The keenest intelligence in the British Isles has recently uttered
what is perhaps its keenest observation. The intelligence is, of
course, Bernard Shaw’s. The observation is that if a great teacher
of his age has done all he ought to do he must expect, and he should
desire, to come in time to seem outmoded, superfluous, even something
of a nuisance. Thinking, Mr. Shaw perceives, is in this respect like
walking: once the habit has been acquired the learner has to practise
it alone. As he cannot be precisely the same person his teacher was,
he must go by different paths to different goals. Indeed, the measure
of the valuable teacher of thinking is his power to show his pupils
how they may reach conclusions he himself never could reach. After
Socrates, Plato; after Plato, Aristotle. It calls, indeed, for an
almost inhuman degree of magnanimity to rejoice when we see ourselves
distanced by those whom we first set upon their feet; Mr. Shaw’s
attitude of willingness, even of eagerness, is a sign of that capacity
for elevated vision which has lent wings to his words and barbs to his
truth. But his prompt admission of a thing which his mind lets him see
is only what he has taught his followers, and his age, to expect of
him. No matter if it does not flatter his pride. He does not have the
kind of pride by the exercise of which a man would rather be president
than be right. He knows that the life of thought depends not upon the
fidelity with which it continues in one direction but upon the vitality
with which it stirs successive generations.
For thinking is part of the human process no less than play or work or
love or aspiration. Its roots are in the protoplasm and its nourishment
comes from living growth. To look back over the long and jagged history
of opinion is to discover that opinions rise and fall but that only the
making and testing of opinion go on for ever; and it is to discover
that opinion has always prospered most when it was most nearly allied
with the creative forces of youth. Perhaps one should hardly call it
opinion at all when those who cherish it are following it in full
pursuit. Perhaps then it is instinct and little more. But the instincts
of youth are precious as nothing else is precious. Youth, viewed
broadly, is always right.
Viewed thus broadly, conservatism is the element of death and
radicalism is the element of life. The human tribe, straggling through
the wilderness of the world, perpetuates itself by begetting and
bearing its young, who, at first protected by bosom and counsel,
eventually detach themselves and move toward the front while their
parents gradually slip toward the rear and are left behind. The process
is cruel but it is real; and it is irresistible. What other course,
after all, is there to take? Who knows where we come from or where
we are going to? If youth has now and then plunged blindly along
blind roads, so has age wrought incalculable evil by inquisitions and
oppressions aimed to check the march of mankind in its natural advance.
Experience grows cynical and lags heavily back, scorning the impulse
to create. Youth staggers under the burden of freeing itself, as if it
were not enough to perform the hard tasks and fight the bitter battles
which the old men of the tribe “wish” upon it. No wonder high hearts
falter under their fate when they do not rebel; no wonder they grow old
so soon and take up the immemorial complaint; no wonder the youth of
any particular generation always does so little. It is right but it is
in the minority.
Fortunately years alone are not the final evidence of youth or age.
Always there are wise men who, like Socrates or Goethe in their days,
or like Bernard Shaw or Anatole France in ours, refuse to grow old
as the seasons increase upon them. They put forth new leaves, they
unfold new blossoms, with a continuous rejuvenescence. They are the
links between young and old. Through their intercession youth grows
conscious of the meaning of its urges, as it is already conscious of
its essential rightness. Through their interpretation age is reminded
of what, left alone, it would always forget: the generous intentions
and the authentic power of youth. They are the true spiritual parents
of the race. Yet what they do is no more than what all parents do who
are not jealous of their children. They watch them at their wild games
with joy that they are so strong. They offer advice which, they hope,
may save them the experience of unnecessary pain and may help them to
realize their potentialities, but they do not feel too much chagrin
when the advice is slighted, knowing that wisdom is incommunicable and
must be learned over again in person by each new apprentice to life.
Alas that there are so few good or wise parents! It is the fault of the
bad and the unwise if they find youth wilful, heedless, insolent. They
have fixed their eyes upon individuals who go astray and not upon the
larger drift in which life is perpetually renewed. Is life itself good
or bad? There are, it is true, divergent answers to the question, but
few are better than that of E. W. Howe, who says: “We have it, and must
make the best of it. And as long as we do not blow our brains out, we
have decided life is worth living.” At least life is best where it is
most vivid—in the heart and ways of youth.
IV. HOWELLS: MAY 1920
EULOGIUM
Mark Twain and Henry James could have agreed on few subjects, but
William Dean Howells was one of them. To such antipodean geniuses he
stood as equally great writer and great friend. “For forty years,”
said Mark Twain in a familiar passage, “his English has been to me a
continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of
certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and
unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my
belief, without his peer in the English-writing world, _Sustained._
I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who
exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by
intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled
and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells’s moon sails cloudless
skies all night and all the nights.” Henry James never ceased to
exclaim at the abundance no less than the discipline of Howells’s
“great garden, ... the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as a
cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and savoury patches, close about the
house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and
observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have laboured,
without a break or a lapse, to this day.... They make a great array, a
literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so acute, so
direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the
case.... The _real_ affair of the American case and character, as it
met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and
attached you, and, heedless of foolish flurries from other quarters, of
all wild or weak slashings of the air and wavings in the void, you gave
yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a
rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of
the real and the interest and the charm of the common, as one may put
it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy,
the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and
with which all the life about you was closely interknitted. Your
hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself
a literary gift, and played with them as the artist only and always
can play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of
his fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth
and the pity and the meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of
observation both sharp and sweet.... Stroke by stroke and book by book
your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole
democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree
_documentary_; so that none other, through all your fine long season,
could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me say, too, was
to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown master, by
insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so easy and so
natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour and the
play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept coming
on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as Fenimore
Cooper’s Leather-Stocking—so knowing to be able to do it!—comes, in the
forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves.”
How great a friend Howells was to Mark Twain and Henry James—the three
of them so much the most important American men of letters in their
generation—comes vividly to light in the brilliant correspondence
already made public by Albert Bigelow Paine and Percy Lubbock. James
admits with a tender eagerness that the editorial hand which Howells
held out to him from the _Atlantic_ in the summer of 1868 “was really
the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help
and sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and
stumbled about a long time without acquiring.” Mark Twain owed Howells
a larger, more intimate debt than mere encouragement at the outset:
nothing did more to civilize the magnificent barbarian who wrote
_The Innocents Abroad_ to a point at which he was capable of writing
_Huckleberry Finn_ than the friendly counsel and judicious approbation
of Howells, who drew him by the “insidious practices” of a perpetually
good example from journalism to literature. He who with one hand
was encouraging the sensitive young dilettante, with the other was
restraining the tumultuous humourist—and at the same time managing
with so great devotion and dexterity his own richly unfolding career.
Neither Mark Twain nor Henry James could have done it for the other
two; the surest and strongest of the three was not either of those who
have most usually been called the geniuses but that one who for his
quietness has been so much too much unheard.