EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR
"Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole
capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he
cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping
friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what
one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing.
This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ."
IBSEN: _Letter to Brandes_,1870.
And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that
all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful,
uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and
passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who
used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his.
Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher
of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark
Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and
unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he
has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every
great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous
relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined
to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian
interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the
labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his
individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to
type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer
environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering
in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has,
from the outset of his life, subjected itself!
Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy
as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations,"
he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition
was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and
uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas
and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an
expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna";
trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark
Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a
person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven
to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they
did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had,
to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the
husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the
purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and
entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of
his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this
narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so
powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that
instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood.
We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's
universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he
seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his
fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his
nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent.
"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a
heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes
and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and
lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came
home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its
eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from
this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed
neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the
worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one
great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's
home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his
domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any
monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him;
it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And
having accepted the rôle of the opulent householder, he threw into it as
much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work.
Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going
to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses
were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up
to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods,"
"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which,
according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to
increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at
hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for
explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those
who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand
that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile,
mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something
almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent
considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of
living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for
some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return,
not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel
Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the
visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently
extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was
living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses
amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In
the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could
furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and
highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural
taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style,
would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those
early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his
"disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that
finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large
hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine,
"he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and
delight of his guests. There were _always_ guests; they were coming and
going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a
'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of
his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay
the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he
virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer
months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his
mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these
things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that
they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed
for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit
cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more
ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the
child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she
found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy!
To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the
public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the
beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large
consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of
adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up
in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of
the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have
remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and
become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing
need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a
professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a
waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt
requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of
casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a
postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use--not to mention
the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were
his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name.
He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of
other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding
he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first
author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work--his
impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in
this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"--that he
had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had
been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can
add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and
one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see
one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact
that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to
which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to
the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the
following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of
marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a
spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises
amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is
not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two
hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained
of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had
to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no
choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he
had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of
his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one
month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to
redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for
a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries
of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred
million dollars.
Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced
in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to
heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"?
Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the
distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy
with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to
follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book
because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"--for this he
had, in fact, become--he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might
say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular
enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the
same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the
proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns
to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he
who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten
days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative
principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at
least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely,
gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make
millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of
authors--he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the
country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster,
"reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone
of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions
a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing
themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them
three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if
his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift
and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he
is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried,
impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against
the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it
with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he
has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says,
"is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means
of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He
"liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was
pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger
to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of
his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of
the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him--"here I
am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt
gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that?
For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had
adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige,
position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation
of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe.
He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more
oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the
trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What
were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of
Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General
Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the
"Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands.
It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it
was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for
getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were
secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost
consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish
weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own
shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what
he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly
confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for
a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid,
penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain,
untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow,
immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most
interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is
quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of
Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing
figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration
of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because
of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his
faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he
admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said,
is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race
prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of
imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American
business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever
held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was
Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut
Yankee," had set out to make mediæval England a "going concern" could
hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that
phenomenon in all history.
Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view
of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European
letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the
appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are
told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his
family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a
distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of
the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be
ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated
by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a
feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity
student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he
told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the
deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to
us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew
him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and
circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find
him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely
imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was
carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters
to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged
in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything
on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the
cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it
was in his power and his fame.
Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in
the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set
against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism,
Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the
headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and
infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has
seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with
complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept
as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding
materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing
so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In
1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a
Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of
improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested
that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he
was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the
great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the
framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far
Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the
colors of the privileged class which the new industrial régime had
brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a
member.
His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his
essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in
the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to
his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence
and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends
the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for
the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets
the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy
which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more
nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the
tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power,
against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I
finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every
time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay
the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not
a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy
of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish
to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age,
"Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a
scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a
Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous
defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living,
tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he
was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one
situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for
trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he
would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating,
frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which
he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent
to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages
in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on
the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on
the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London
drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the
Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the
insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of
sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral
splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men
benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly
opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this
was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time
he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have
afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his
letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry
views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily
written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to
dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud
voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of
his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing
attendance on him!--how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not
hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly
have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the
principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic
victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one
situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate
the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality;
and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his
dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an
article passionately advocating that the salaries of American
ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be
devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true
function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing
it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial
society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement.
As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take
precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with
him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the
pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the
feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on
England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the
scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend
those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson
having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English
Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to
the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument,
how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic
bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was
regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book.
As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to
include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less
and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself
against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious
tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with
very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive
economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in
his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply
he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How,
then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in
his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more
than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had
once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy
Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to
say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I
never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore
when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to
the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant
self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel
of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the
Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for
in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is
lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a
Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book
or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find
him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other
Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into
his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint
Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut
Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch
whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to
accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was
Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself
over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he
who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in
a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy
Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there
recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his
Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of
Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated.
So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed
reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty
liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the
American nation in the hollow of his hand--the nation, or rather the
epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or
trump--but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home
with his public--he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to
pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he
does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored
family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from
every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark
Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause
would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that
matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole
neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a
unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all,
had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor.
Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character
he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an
uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an
expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his
surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naïve worship
of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical
inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of
subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this
let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I
have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips,
spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at
all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And
once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular rôle and had
forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the
pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards
of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he
had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a
reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years
and an ass for fifty-five."
It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's
instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of
literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was
merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any
other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination
for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other
business man--to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make
money because other people made money and to make more money than other
people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother
Orion: "I am in for it now. 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." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the
span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I
have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford
it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away."
Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was
sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to
realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and
in the other that he had not lived it--for certainly his marriage had
not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public!
Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so
supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no
conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist,
he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business
enterprise and of letters.
"If Sam had got that pocket"--we remember the saying of his old
California comrade--"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of
his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent
of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he
have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes
happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and
perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its _débâcle_, Mark
Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to
stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy,
"have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had
been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own
books and works entirely; and the other evening, 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." Certainly he would never have so
neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes
of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as
well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of
the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing
business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We
have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have
been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it":
of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my
retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain
pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we
can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this
ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical
aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning
Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is
simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade
and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband,
found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the
material rewards it brought him.
How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point
of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those
middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised
men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to
the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the
hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr.
Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the
literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's
cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how
Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a
personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the
word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as
against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic
of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the
Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain
disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the
Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to
mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her
husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as
nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the
illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was
identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his
brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting
Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion--At 12:20 this afternoon a
line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the
first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was
done _automatically_--instantly--perfectly. This is indeed the first
line of movable types that ever _was_ perfectly spaced and perfectly
justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the
immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute.
Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well--dizzy,
stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human
brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful
mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how
wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered
the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was
fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away,
too far away--as even his financial interest was too shallow, after
all--to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable
mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence,
of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark
Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a
piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of
the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of
the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations
in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he
called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations
are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets
who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's
seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such
people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had
witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and
innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age
for having produced Walt Whitman.