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.