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.