IN THE CRUCIBLE
"The American proposes to realize his individuality freely
and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and
free to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly
consenting that some other person, better qualified or more
competent, should choose in his place. From the instant when
he can do what he will, he easily wills what he is asked to
will."
GUSTAVE RODRIGUES: _The People of Action_.
Recollect, now, the mood in which Mark Twain went West to the
gold-fields of Nevada--the mood of a "regular fellow." Was it not one
that exposed him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded
Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the
woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about
a timber claim which he and a comrade had located. He was out for a good
time, oblivious of everything else and with all the unconsciousness of a
child. A moralist would have said that the devil had already marked him
out for destruction.
Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had impressed his confrères of
the wheel: "the pilots regarded him as a great reader--a student of
history, travels, literature and the sciences--a young man whom it was
an education as well as an entertainment to know." Now, in Nevada, says
Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally regarded him as an easy-going,
indolent good fellow with a love of humor--with talent, perhaps--but as
one not likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that suggest a
certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer this, in any case, from
the sudden change in his personal appearance, always a sort of
barometric symptom in Mark Twain's life. "Lately a river sovereign and
dandy--in fancy percales and patent leathers--in white duck and striped
shirts--he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch
hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of
the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in
dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further
than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable
surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And
whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his
utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life
as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing
vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000 a year. But I don't
suppose I shall ever be any account." The reversion to that earlier
frame of mind, in short, had not made this man, who was approaching
thirty, a boy again: it made him behave like a boy, it made him, half
the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed in him, nevertheless, the
indisputable signs of a certain dereliction from some path of
development his nature had commanded him to follow. The artist in him
had lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just as he had
been after his father's death; his spirit had become plastic once more.
He was ready, in a word, to take the stamp of his new environment.
Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded Age was doubly true
of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine says, "all human beings, regardless of
previous affiliations and convictions, were flung into the common
fusing-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer." Life in the
gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensification of pioneering, it
was a sort of furnace in which all the elements of human nature were
transmuted into a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion
of avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description in "Roughing
It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City, we can see that the spirit of
the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there
as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the
'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever
produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves
were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other
vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost
fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes
that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in
every heart. Money was as plenty as dust.... There were military
companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theaters,
'hurdy-gurdy houses,' wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows,
civic processions, street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey
mill every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen jails and
station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church.
The 'flush times' were in magnificent flower!... The great 'Comstock
lode' stretched its opulent length straight through the town from North
to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process of development."
This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment, a spirit inflexibly
opposed, as we can see, to the development of individuality. Had Mark
Twain been free, it might have been a matter of indifference to him; he
might have gone his own way and amused himself with the astonishing
spectacle of the gold-fields and then taken himself off again. But Mark
Twain was not free; he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that,
far from being able to stand aloof from his environment, he had to make
terms with it. For what obligations had he not incurred! To become such
a conventional citizen as his father would have approved of, to make
money and restore the fallen fortunes of his family--that old pledge was
fixed in the back of his mind, where it had been confirmed by his
failure to discover and assert any independent principle of his own.
Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was
the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally
enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great
triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered
it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were
gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to
exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing
what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line,
more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the
river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his
father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had
become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family. "His brother
Orion was ten years older," says Mr. Paine, "but he had not the gift of
success. By common consent, the young brother assumed permanently the
position of family counselor and financier." These circumstances, I say,
compelled Mark Twain to make terms with public opinion. He could not
fall too far behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for
him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been his and to shine
once more as a conspicuous and important personage, he had to "make
good" again, quickly and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also
become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see from one of his
Nevada letters in which he declares earnestly that he will never look
upon his mother's face again, or his sister's, or get married, or
revisit the "Banner State," until he is a rich man.
What chance was there now for the artist in Mark Twain to find itself?
A unique opportunity had led him for four years into the channel of
inner development through a special vocation; but it was only the
indispensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that had
obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No special vocation was
indispensable in Nevada; consequently, no special vocation was
tolerated. There, the pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held
absolute sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered with the
rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who
submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards: his higher
standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the
easy methods of his neighbors" and he himself impaired "the consistency
of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value."
Even if Mark Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his creative
instinct, therefore--and he was anything but fully aware of them--he
could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his
craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to
acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of
sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--all
those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct--were, from
the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely
in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken
down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the
tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in
them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his
own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly
organized nervous system, they devised the most complicated methods of
torturing him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum pipe,
which cut him to the quick, this man who had been betrayed into uttering
words of heartfelt gratitude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks
of Steve Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief," was
always finding means to prevent him from reading; there was the famous
hold-up on the Divide on the night of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it
our way," said one of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He
was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of his individuality
was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark Twain was reminded a dozen times a
day that his natural instincts and desires and tendencies were
incompatible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any man who
was pledged to succeed in it. That is why, though he always retaliated
at first, he always yielded in the end.
Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his acquisitive
instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the personal instinct fell, was
stimulated to the highest degree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one
could hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends one
afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said they had been buying
'Overman' stock at auction at eight dollars a foot. One said if I would
come up to his office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he
would add fifteen; the third said he would do the same. But I was going
after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all
their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around
to tell me about it--and also to urge me to accept of the next
forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual
facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself
strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as
twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a
foot; and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest
a cigar. These were 'flush times' indeed!" In short, in order to stand
in with pioneer society, it was not enough to repress everything in you
that made you "different"; you had to form extravagant habits, you had
to treat money like water, and you had to make it! Mark Twain was not
merely obliged to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his
level best to become a millionaire.
It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain
failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth
a tantalizing possibility. He describes, though we are told with
exaggeration, how he was once "a millionaire for ten days." But he
failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new
work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot.
Concentration, perseverance, above all, judgment--these were the
qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's life
had instantly matured him; the life of sheer exploitation, in spite of
his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in
spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not
fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He
went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied
me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining.
"The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told,
"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their
movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and
suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom
humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are
likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the
flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense
anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the other
extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up
everything and go away. "If Sam had got that pocket," said one of his
comrades, of his last exploit, "he would have remained a pocket-miner to
the end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had been able to
bring to the situation any of the qualities he would have brought to a
critical situation on the Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed
simply because he did not care enough about money, merely as money, to
succeed. His real self, the artist, in short, could not develop, and
yet, repressed as it was, it prevented him from becoming whole-heartedly
anything else. We shall see this exhibited throughout the whole of Mark
Twain's business life.
So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma. His unconscious
desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of
individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in
the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted
him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the
necessary powers in himself. The eternal dilemma of every American
writer! It was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain
solved by becoming a humorist.
Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing in Mark Twain's
soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine's pages. We are told scarcely more
than that he was extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one of
his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would come a reaction and he
would hardly speak for a day or two." Constantly we find him going off
"alone into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away entirely
from humankind." There were other times when he "talked little or not at
all, but sat in one corner and wrote, wholly oblivious of his
surroundings"--wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would
hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything
else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to
establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the
fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh."
"He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner
who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a
camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!--all the
contempt and hostility of the pioneers for literature, all Mark Twain's
fear of public opinion, all the force of his own counter-impulse to
succeed on pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in
himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see these mixed motives
in the strange, realistic bravado with which he said to a man who wanted
to start a literary magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any
one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of Sahara, set up
hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for mining sulphur, start a literary
paper in Virginia City; hell!"
Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with some literary
pretensions called the _Enterprise_, which was edited and written by a
group of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was
to the _Enterprise_ that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and
at last he was offered a position on the staff. This position he
presently accepted. It is significant, however, that he did so with
profound reluctance.
Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born
writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any
opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a
life of literary activities and associations. He would naturally have
gravitated toward such people as the _Enterprise_ group: that he did so
is proved by his constantly courting them as a contributor. But
committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a
different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky
journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the
pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody wanted to laugh and have a
good time," says Mr. Paine. "The _Enterprise_, 'Comstock to the
backbone,' did what it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain
could not have thought he would be losing caste by connecting himself
with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last,
as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'"
says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as
a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he
fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when
"the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all
hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding
himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile
walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness,"
says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he
came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How
different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his
piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked
forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an
inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself
and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a
capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a
hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the _Enterprise_ office worn and
travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. "My starboard
leg seems to be unshipped," he announced at the door. "I'd like about
one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces." Then he
added: "My name is Clemens, and I've come to write for the paper." It
was, says Mr. Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to
claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feeling that there is
something painful in that scene, something shamefaced, something that
suggests not an acclamation but a surrender?
Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff of the
_Enterprise_ Mark Twain was in some way transgressing his own desire. He
attributes this, however, to another motive than the one that seems to
me dominant. Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to
break into literature, even under those urgent conditions. It meant the
surrender of all hope in the mines, the confession of another failure."
No doubt Mark Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had more
or less committed himself to mining, he was turning his back besides on
the line of activity his mother and his companions approved of; he was
relinquishing the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of fortune
that might have bought his freedom once for all. In short, there were
plenty of reasons dictated by his acquisitive instinct for making him
reluctant to surrender the mining career in which he had proved himself
so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been stimulated to
excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist,
and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this
opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must
consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but
the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the
creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but
actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the
_Enterprise_ mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he
had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles,
and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of
a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by
the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was
this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens
the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of thing we want." Mark
Twain knew this; he knew that, although the policy of the _Enterprise_
was one of "absolutely free speech," he would be expected to cultivate
that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth and prestige,
the obligation to make money which would become all the more pressing if
he relinquished the direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would
prevent him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating any
other vein than that which promised him the greatest popularity. For
him, therefore, the opportunity of the _Enterprise_ meant an obligation
to become virtually a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he
wished to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see, he would
not have displayed such reluctance in joining the _Enterprise_, and the
fact that he displayed this reluctance shows us that in becoming a
humorist he felt that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling
his own soul.
Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the time has not yet come
to discuss the psychogenesis and the significance of Mark Twain's humor.
But that it was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how, to his
amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giving a public reading
together, the latter, whom he had supposed happy and satisfied with his
triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and
said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself--I am allowing
myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any
longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied
himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him, to
choosing selections for his next reading which would be justified not
only as humor but as literature and art. This is only one of many
instances of Mark Twain's lifelong revolt against a rôle which he
apparently felt had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate
all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which he accepted it.
But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions.
Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, "the writer
rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the
mining shares he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his new
title"--the pen-name he had adopted--"and its success." He knew that his
severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings,
worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he
was making; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a
rich man was ashamed in his mother's eyes to have adopted a career that
promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the
mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately
proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his
new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we
actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to
telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That
he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that
he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a
commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name:
"His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned,"
says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not
with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was
necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a
good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the
_nom de plume_ was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief,
crisp, definite, unforgettable. He tried over a good many combinations
in his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In short, he wanted
a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his
merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the
time--in pioneer circles, especially, observe--simply argues that all
the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a
form of "protective coloration" for men who could not risk, in their own
persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting
coincidence that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied "safe
water." We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in
Mark Twain's life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought
of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which
he was proud only because it paid.
It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he
had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone
astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was
intermittent; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was
desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the
evidence of a "bad conscience." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been
here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We
are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find
with the rooms or the people.... But I need change and must move again."
Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is
certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is
crystallizing along its proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his
journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. "No--not
home again--in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The
city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business
anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had
become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had
been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a
loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the
trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New
York as he is about to start on the _Quaker City_ excursion which is to
result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two
letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of
his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he
says: "I am wild with impatience to move--move--_move_!... Curse the
endless delays! They always kill me--they make me neglect every duty and
then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never
had to stop anywhere a month." The second is even more specific: "I am
so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored
full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an
accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless
moving from place to place.... You observe that under a cheerful
exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely
its contempt." The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly
unacceptable: far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward his
family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the
most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. "Under a cheerful
exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely
its contempt." Could he say more plainly that he has committed himself
to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way,
transgressed his principle of growth?
One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping Frog" was published in
New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it
was "voted the best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still in
the West, receive the news of his success? "The telegraph," says Mr.
Paine, "did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while
for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a
lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought
disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author. Even Artemus
Ward's opinion of the story had not increased Mark Twain's regard for it
as literature. That it had struck the popular note meant, as he
believed, failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter written
January 20, 1866, he says these things for himself: 'I do not know what
to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up
and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth--save
piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be
excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single
out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!--"Jim Smiley and
His Jumping Frog"--a squib which would never have been written but to
please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed
that he had not even offered it to _The Californian_, the magazine to
which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard
it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter
prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he
has drifted into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the other
hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has achieved. "I am in for
it," he writes to his brother. "I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I
marry, _then_ I am done with literature and all other bosh--that is,
literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to
please myself then." Marriage, he says to himself, is going to liberate
him, this poor, ingenuous being!--this divided soul who has never been
able to find any other criterion than that of an environment which knows
no criterion but success. His destiny, meanwhile, has passed out of his
own hands: that is the significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping
Frog." As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony: "The stone
rejected by the builder was made the corner-stone of his literary
edifice."
So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a humorist. He had adopted
this rôle unwillingly, as a compromise, at the expense of his artistic
self-respect, because it afforded the only available means of satisfying
that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his creative
instinct, had become dominant in him, the gregarious, acquisitive
instinct of the success-loving pioneer. And what a corroboration that
instinct now received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified by
public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the stage," says Mr. Paine,
"was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that
never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings
of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been
to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word--his nod, even,
constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler
calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order
to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak
child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hannibal
life if he had not exerted his imagination and prevailed over his
companions by means other than physical. This dream had been fulfilled
in his piloting career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular.
United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other desire to make
money, to please his family, to "make good" in pioneer terms, it
received a confirmation so prodigious that the despised, rejected,
repressed, inarticulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck dumb
and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments were lulled to rest.
Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed out as one of the sights
of the territory; his sayings were everywhere repeated on the streets.
Tom Sawyer was walking the stage and "revelling in his power." Crashes
of applause greeted his platform sallies; "the Comstock, ready to
laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his expression and discovered
a vast humor in his most earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the
mining-towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; "his
improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect."
He had "acquired," in short, "a new and lucrative profession at a
bound"; and before he went East, and owing to the success of "The
Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined to regard him, in some
degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute
accordingly." When he set out on the voyage of the _Quaker City_ he
found himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sherman and Henry
Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to
follow the publication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second
book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and
intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides
this, it brought him the recognition of _The Atlantic Monthly_. It
brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the
postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a
choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be
disposed to accept--"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a
Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's
appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It
brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London,
assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London--mine being
(between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was
received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the
long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least
one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on
any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in
gold for a single evening; and so popular were these lectures that when
one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny Kemble, the favorite
actress of the period, "Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred
against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain."
Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which
he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset
his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in
Nevada and California we are told that "it paid him well; he could go
home now, without shame." But even the promptings of his artistic
conscience were now parried and laid at rest: "he had grown more lenient
in his opinion of the merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had
made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had
pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in
America.'" Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored
regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely
overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most.
It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his destiny. James
Russell Lowell and "the brains of London"! There was little criticism in
their careless judgments, but how was Mark Twain to know that? He was a
humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had no means of knowing
that he was intended to be something else, that he really wished to be
something else. They found him funny, and he was just as funny as they
found him; but to Mark Twain their praise meant more than that; it meant
something like a solemn sanction of his career from the world of
culture. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal
visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give himself airs; but
to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only
ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been
a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent
barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the
presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen
applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a
dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do
it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to
his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being
gulled, and partly because he wasn't--because the beautiful force of
his natural personality would have commanded attention anywhere,
because, also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall banquets,
are not too discriminating when it comes to "laughter and tears" with
slow music, or books like "The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was
not the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was that he was
being heartily slapped on the back, in no too obviously patronizing way,
by the people who really _knew_, whose judgment could really be trusted.
Yet England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned, was simply
countersigning the verdict of America.
For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain
men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have
seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation
into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment
when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business
agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about
this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But
the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America
played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over
to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward--these
must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a
diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was
not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything
less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all
their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made.
It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus
Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada
world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are
told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps
with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too
could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's
counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit
with possibilities of inner growth before him--what could Artemus Ward
have known about such things?--but as an embryonic institution, so to
speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself
and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he
ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was
subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability,"
said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement
of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and
character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with
inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had
been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we
look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les
Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for
knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can
we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not
withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known,
had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not
already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America
capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said
to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least
resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your
mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend--into life
and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and
"extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never
forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he
acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and
refined party" of the _Quaker City_ excursion which led him to the feet
of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward
Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread
and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here,"
said he--Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now
here, you are one of the talented men of the age--nobody is going to
deny that--but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than
enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do
it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him
how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his
percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in
the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were
the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men
of statecraft, literature and divinity.
Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance
of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner
peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him
committed to the pursuit of worldly success.
That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a
creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career.
He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral
infantility. We know that the rôle of laugh-maker had, from early
adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in
Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers
laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud
and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk,
where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his
audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that,
he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in
public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had
returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held
so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That
persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to
a _métier_ in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of
craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It
was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least
resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was
falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied
that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the
artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a
journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance.
Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he
wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have
doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements,
except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me."
To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success
of his book--a success the like of which had scarcely been known in
America--Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a
journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and
editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the
rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer
with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that
Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's
fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest
point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had
temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now
again literature had dropped into the background, had become an
avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial
interests!--there were whole years during which he thought of hardly
anything else.
This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say,
with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic
attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to
"follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a
series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage
of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the
same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of
adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was
this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered
by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the
success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other
autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige
machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning
to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary
life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the
boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a
peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other
phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various rôles he has
played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or
education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I
ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that
under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the
reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really
experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all
different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the
artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an
infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he
tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and
again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There
was nothing new in that story"--"The American Claimant"--"but the
finger-prints in this one is virgin ground--absolutely _fresh_, and
mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied
a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded
to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public
wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with
what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"--the
possibilities of this, the possibilities of that--in the commercial, not
in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the
promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with
its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him,
in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series
that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not
as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally
conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his
life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot
and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant
of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naïvely,
"but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a
thing as an artist had never existed.
Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark
Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his
agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall,
Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain
hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is
reputation anyway--money is secondary." So he floods the house with
complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he
says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune
didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and
your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the
country." It was true. But in that moment--that typical moment, in that
reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's
die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with
generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to
walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes
to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a
spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a
formidable spirit, that _alter ego_ within him,--he is going to hear its
bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice:
his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the
dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned
over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished
to secure a government appointment for Orion."
Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable
sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says--with an emphasis of his
own--he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief.
From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called
adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence
without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself"
now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments."