THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY
"Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as
bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride."
IBSEN: _The Comedy of Love_.
The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled,
consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead
himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and
still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most
consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own
way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy
calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what
Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable,
of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so
little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in
America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself:
"in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious
things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to
practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon
one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the
bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top.
No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of
industry.
Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he
put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light
are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if
Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the
children of light he would have been perfectly free--to starve and to
shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its
moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he
could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the
recognized American game according to the recognized American rules.
Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct
of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just
because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks
of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that
people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling
them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the
lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a
personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his
environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear
for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the
most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without
foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr.
Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he
wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes,
to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left
vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished
him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he
met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make
good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew
the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in
prestige, stood to him _in loco parentis_; and, to complete the ironic
circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a
Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them
he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr.
Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody."
The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later
years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we
are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser
Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit
heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions
that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the
will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus
Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what
they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret
Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently
until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to
a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in
the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above
all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first
moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary
affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature
and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean
Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The
Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the
woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom
with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual
rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by
his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the
self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go
his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always
been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve
it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S.
McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself.
In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to
the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the
prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a
contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the
community to which money is the primary condition and the primary
instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew
Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged
to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the
spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an
expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a
young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued
now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And
meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social
inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish
manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness--everything that made
foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that
would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to
consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of
a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of
bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had
ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had
become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of
humor was a gold-mine--so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently
cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He
was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he
wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot
properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we
realize that he had been manœuvered into the rôle of a candidate for
gentility.
But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had
been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his
creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead
father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his
mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man,
in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take
precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been
the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the
days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he
was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go
back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure
as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained
precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time,
we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever--proud (even if somewhat,
critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had
been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him,
scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In
turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the
same Sam, and always would be--a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true
that Mark Twain, _who_ required authority as much as he required
affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who
would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be
mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at
least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and
afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the _Quaker
City_ party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and
character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed
my buttons on," he wrote--he was thirty-two at the time--"kept my
clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved),
lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only
natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife
"implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his
subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson,
"she edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my
works--she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the
totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia
Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death
Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her.
Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about
him?--"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was,
I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken
the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place.
Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara
Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the
billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."--a sign that was
always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been
called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used
to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him
straight--"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he
went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have
been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue
of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male.
As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest
that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been
affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other
reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to
adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest
instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of
success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with
the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on
terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old
renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make
good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated
obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just
as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or
finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little
less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying
that, automatically, her gods had become his.
It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations
between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere
of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even
of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is
regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English
criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle,
Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family
and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village
ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At
bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic
analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is
of profound importance to society and because they know that what any
man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and
affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind
that all the best biographies even of our American worthies--Hamilton,
Franklin and Lincoln, for instance--have been written by Englishmen! No
one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society
has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When,
therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited
his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who,
whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his rôle as a realist and
carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her
heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest
has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and
that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations
and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist
and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of
European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New
Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as
creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs.
Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband,
she stepped immediately into a rôle far more truly influential than that
of any President.
Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and
mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in
any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization
all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual
culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted
down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had
attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social
stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant,
fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter
generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular
sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast,
imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to
submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august
brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains
on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with
their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The
quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect
based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of
the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice
proclaimed them sacrosanct.
We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a
presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place--a place
of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer,
pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the
daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not
to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame
did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted
almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that
Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of
Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he
had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had
been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect
for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt
himself, the interloper then--he would not have been Carlyle but the
stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark
Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl
without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned
anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been
conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her
friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore--and love
compelled him to do that--he had to win the approval and the pride of
Elmira itself, he had to win the _imprimatur_ of all that vast and
intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the
symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol,"
that "no one was good enough for her--certainly not this adventurous
soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark
Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy
upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in
order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in
California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his
character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the
"worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover
on his mettle?
Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this
new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able
to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his
candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the
vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and
lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know,
"he had become suddenly a person of substance--an associate of men of
consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He
was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to
that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to
refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But
could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we
are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his
financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book,"
he wrote, "unless there was _money_ in it, and a good deal of it"; he
had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and
"conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were
almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent
and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his
marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already--the best possible
omen for one with his resources--$22,000 in debt! He had put his
shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even
faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so
manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being
equal--and his wife would see to that--he really was a safe,
conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon
capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain,
anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to
cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been
accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course
they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and
besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start
them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in
"The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal
that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration,
whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all
significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author
adds, naïvely, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated
as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon
in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally
stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that
this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his
gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot
forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable
street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage
and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous _ménage_.
It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's
wedding day!--he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the
confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely
committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the
outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly
shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had
foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told,
"lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper
enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the
ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the
ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged
it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound
himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that
Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo _Express._
Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business
man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one.
The full consequences of this moral surrender--shall we call it?--can
only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that,
precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently
and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he
might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in
his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many
other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven
back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect _horror_ and
heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the
bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I
cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I
suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you
would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have
wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems
to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who
was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His
bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom.
"Farewell--a long farewell--to business!" he exclaimed during those
weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will _never_ touch
it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I
will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as
follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good
and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer
up--don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has
been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. _Except_ when I think of
you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving
and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem
to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the
dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but
no dishonor--and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho,
Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she
doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't
convince _me_!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary
of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before
all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira,
who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her
husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind
in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur.
She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and
all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in
the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to
retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very
ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he
was involved more and more deeply in it.
As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation
as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should
adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that
he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the
matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had
promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was
laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed
his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical
type--at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete
invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to
sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her
back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results,
to arise and walk--Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility,
and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life.
"I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark
Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first
child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal
absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his
wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I
am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _then_ I am
done with literature and all other bosh--that is, literature wherewith
to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What
chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the
pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find
his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never
possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new
life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are
valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are
admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that
private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime
interests of man.
"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is
said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and
the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all
matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast.
"Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of
supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for
the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a
little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely
going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had
been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort";
but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and
purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his
personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she
set about it in the right way--gently, and with a tender gratitude in
each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward
the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering,
indifferent attitude toward life--to her always so serious and sacred;
she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of
religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his
religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens
had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own....
It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family
prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a
Bible chapter." Thus was reëstablished over him that old Calvinistic
spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a
child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what
fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious
man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world,
for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time,"
says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly
with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with
the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the
proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had
long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she
prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness
to which he, the chivalrous Southerner--the born cavalier, in
reality--could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him
"Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in
keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could
never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only
accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he
gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her
"exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own
judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as
another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would
quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral."
It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the
blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in
turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive
about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me
do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was
partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake,
but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between
the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial
body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in
their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was
also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried
to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having
annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in
order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose
approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of
embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table
that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray,
"and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was
almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the
guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells
after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells
bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than
we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last
moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send
her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more
for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for
mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when,
after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had
privately suggested to you that we hadn't any _frames,_ and that if you
wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was
simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How _could_
you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive
nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have
been intolerable to her that, at the _Atlantic_ dinners, her husband, in
spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood
was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as
Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme,
unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all
hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his
Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace
does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my
list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I
was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my
repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as
an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not
been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it
tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain,
as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods.
Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character
can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his
marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter
of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of
letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept
him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial
assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo _Express_; in return,
he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his
Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be
immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate
editorship of the Buffalo _Express_ without a single word of comfort or
encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to
be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word
shall be as brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having a
friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going
to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not
going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make
trouble.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom
is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more
innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage
had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of
chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already
induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting
"parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal,
the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could
manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief
censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed
him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture,
meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please
Boston--impossible, terrifying task!--had become as obligatory upon Mark
Twain as to please Elmira.
We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the
Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider
the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared
to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of
his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston
audience--4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and
he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in
a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a
charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells
was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the
nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the
latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her
husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled
them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter
of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a
court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him--to his
own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to
your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who
takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and
of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject
when Livy took charge of me ... and I may _still_ be to the rest of the
world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no
doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been
enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as
an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own
self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in
behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no
comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were
themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges
of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's
neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It
seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an
old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great
embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder
that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do
about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats
and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In
this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility--provincial because it
was without a sense of proportion--were kept constantly before his mind
and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the
Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad
threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple
Delilah his wife.
For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a
taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The
criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens
and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they
formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to
read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of
life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could
not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion
of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud,
under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible
and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive
ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word,
was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold
novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language
for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at
work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so
greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather
discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all.
"Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs.
Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable
damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other
way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind
fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And
shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by
the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy
says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're
going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly
gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits
and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody
might have written but whose romantic mediævalism was equally
respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs.
Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have
been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher."
Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural
genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such
subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if
we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in
these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of
"blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark
Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only
tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly
pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds:
"It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He
persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet
acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to
friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so
little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this
mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was,
precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to
live down.
Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the rôle of critic and censor. A
memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over
the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her
task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them:
Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word
would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty
often.
But can't I get it in _any_where? You've knocked it out
every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble,
good word.
Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing
a slave boy.
It's out, and my father is whitewashed.
Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change
"breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate.
I would take that and "offal" out of the language.
You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy.
We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive
as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility
and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste,
no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no
artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for
bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his
latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as
something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of
conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine,
specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another";
and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to
further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially
as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him,
as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash
not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr.
Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't
afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his
letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the
"swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the
thing Huck would say"--namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark
Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a
certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it
into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his
conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the
German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr.
Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs.
Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute
she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her
tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to
miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her.
Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my
scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little
one-sided?"
They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers
behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for
an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success.
"Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party--in
Rome--he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one
wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs.
Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself,
you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett,
regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've
been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these
tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an
ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia.
Very humiliating, and also very tragic!
Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western
life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to
win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking,
seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant
word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of
liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess
that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character"
was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that
grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to
formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud,
free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well,
he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins
themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And
in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all
the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal,
instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the
genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature
and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to
seek.
Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain
Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty
years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough
in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it
assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he
wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his
little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up
and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one
more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do
anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to,
and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one
locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in
1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular
success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he
had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from
pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire--we know it as
much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his
own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious
to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of
corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was
here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid
before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said:
'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere
magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself--publish it
first in England--ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some
of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There
was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of
the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark
Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe
in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no!
The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was
to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great
leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child
who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to
smoke the pipe of truth.
Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it
shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe
and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man--is it
remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy,
happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife,
the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game
as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns
an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life
is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time,
as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five
on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week
day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss
wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday,
on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a
will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from
responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of
creating standards of his own and living up to them?
"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him,"
wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which
influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets
him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find
himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose
approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's
command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a
deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views
which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and
blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in
public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like
the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his
environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color--had
he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul?
"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his
life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had
never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor
express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more
idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any
possibility have occurred to him to _resolve_ to become brave. He _could
not originate the idea_--it had to come to him from the _outside_."
The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of
Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic
plea in self-extenuation?