THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS
"How can great minds be produced in a country where the test
of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?"
JOHN STUART MILL.
We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in
Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America
indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we
recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to
the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every
influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of
opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the
real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling
Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which
had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real
Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained
rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a
child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this
childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual
independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work
as a writer.
"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous
temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one
written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland
where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three
at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing
that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him
to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations.
To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as
we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the
torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got
back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he
could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and
when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he
would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been
so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what
he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I
was the kind of person that _does_ things. Does them and reflects
afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without
asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that
time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been
punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and
reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I
still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and
reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition
of immaturity.
Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for
gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the
fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed
dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes
of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had
the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were
staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go
down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an
elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at
the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the
dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to
this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he
added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went
back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came
down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a
really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley.
To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like
descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place
where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous
at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully
protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk
waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was
seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along
the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the
dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for
his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do
the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one.
When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at
Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford
pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was
"planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient
Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would
have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or
rather still, Tom Sawyer?
Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense
of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of
his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not
Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell
that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a
literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not
affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so
increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our
political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where
that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to
have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and
economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his
traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social
tendencies that had so spectacular a _dénouement_ within four years of
his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the
century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's
funeral--"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy,
"will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from
now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the
Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was
involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might
almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is
scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy
of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of
it--indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity
regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same
rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think
of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a
succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives
wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that
the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of
Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the
world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification
whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was
"entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political
history."
And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark
Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr.
Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of
sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social,
political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would
expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for
example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It
requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious
little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the
communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade
every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the
sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters?
Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most
conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly
unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all.
And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped æsthetic
sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the
common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of
an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch
below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the
majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous
acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world
remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in
heaven":--"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to
have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in
matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is
mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going
to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did
he like? In painting, Landseer--"and the way he makes animals absolute
flesh and blood--insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little
and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could
tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the
beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and
that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than
any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs
America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry,
Kipling--"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are
told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a
sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained
his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that
Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the
fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar
Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of
doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbô,"
which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was
wholly non-æsthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could
stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively.
He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's
"Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have
taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of
all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight
in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and
Thanatopsianism--in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the
most primitive form of æsthetic emotion, combined with just those tints
of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are
characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence.
Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the
mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his
lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic
self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose
extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes
gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of
letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love,
the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of
greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his
own juvenility freely registered itself.
"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very
remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old,
"but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have
developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ...
he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even."
I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the
fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has
been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist;
she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been
the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim,
childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm
perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of
that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was
in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in
upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of
happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual
and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells,
Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children
themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house
always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider
scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish
hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by
trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an
energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have
guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells
reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books;
admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view,
there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story
of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that
story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown
men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy
was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds
the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps
that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it.
Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there
ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His
mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and
without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off
as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which
would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from
his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable
were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable
to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was
super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was
doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe.
Unused, half-used, misused--was ever anything like that energy? Mr.
Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because
his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of
darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing
himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were,
because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to
the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A
Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant
trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of
gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention,
unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to
turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the
final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest
as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead
lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty,
thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr.
Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been
published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't
have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's
letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His
mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance
that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature
tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's
way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the
fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded
manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts
about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the
Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the
interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer
Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in
1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly
tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family
censor--"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a
dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn
Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which
Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death--how many others
were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large,
loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in
his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions--how
like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of
authority!--was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast
flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk--was it garrulous, was it not
rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an
undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space,
following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness,
outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind?
An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty--could there be a
surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all
this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon
who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two
supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his
writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has
monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art.
Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits
of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is--where
shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can
write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898;
"but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I
didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't
play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that
years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a
play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine
articles and books--and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this
a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a
talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of
letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from
attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but
the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and
well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had
interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those
months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He
appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he
found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of
beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true
even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he
was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the
Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd
contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the
publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know
how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn."
This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the
composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd,
impossible performance"--no doubt because he had been able to write the
whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only
by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He
wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing
and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing
it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but
incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was
probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more
ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession
of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was
he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in
defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was
the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold.
In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we
observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden
desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot
master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to
interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of
sustained interest in his work--his lack of interest in literature
itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of
his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the
technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else,
surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his
æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by
æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems
to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in
literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs.
Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had
never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother
had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed,
he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of
Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution,
in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane
Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper--is not
that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here
again there was a positive note--his lifelong preoccupation with
grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas
by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly
verbal!--"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful
German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's
Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells,"
"General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation
in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells
that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for
saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some
imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling
women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward
the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be
infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are
all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his
first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I
suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in
the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with
letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of
"Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring
from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing
off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to
take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially
never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well?
Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man
is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his
taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some
slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training"
having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years
after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright
copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals,
although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to
understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays,
obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human
spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The
Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark
Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the
expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through
the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican--all the galleries.... We
examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence,
Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we
didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar
stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We
fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor
and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its
pet feature--there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and
Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a
hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and,
more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known
was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the
American people of his time were simply the English middle class
transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to
Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to
have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife
and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had
subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his
mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an
old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream
of the "land of Egypt"--Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at
all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European
tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man.
His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of
the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry
and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of
Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with
these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which
had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all
the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage.
How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine
speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to
construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate
personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief
gifts--transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater
at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are
indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation
in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process
of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of
them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in
design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or
historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad,"
"Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom
Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he
said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he
assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon
his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose
in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the
Mississippi"--and even there it is the river itself and not its human
nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in
Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of
American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never
become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over
that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed
to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his
characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has
sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only
characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded
Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say,
he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and
what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story:
unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he
says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined
sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the
book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not
attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail
how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in
passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is
perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been
transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do.
He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in
consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even
to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of
his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos
of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life:
consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear
of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his
imagination.
We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit
with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the
artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of
influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas
are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's
imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except
for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his
own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own
spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without
development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins--a
fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins":
"Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost
entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private
venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not
to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going.
When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded
by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal
experience.
Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage
that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson
Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he
had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had
come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It
was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should
write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he
set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and
stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad":
we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down
the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which,
because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in
nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never
used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems
hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to
write for the _Atlantic_ and it is only then that fresh memories rise in
his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand
for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to
Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A
Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful
for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even
"Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not
spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the
story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in
him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in
another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells
to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written
for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and
slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to _The Atlantic_," says Mr.
Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and
before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to
work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of
it are condemned here and there and yonder."
Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious
"laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary
sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at
the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on
authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that
to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but
what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose
luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him,
especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in
bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy
comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that
indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to
spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no
doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his
matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether
useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too
seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent
assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary,
and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign
that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of
those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with
all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a
boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a
journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the
goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low
that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged
him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the
capitalist régime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of
reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system
in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare
himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was
predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492
of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very
last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide
repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written:
'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one
imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But
who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from
a lazy line?
It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can
explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was
subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take
notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make
speeches." That innocent _réclame_ of his, that irresistible passion for
the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to
have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his
inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart
had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For
court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living
that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done
worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four
months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on
the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one
of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was
dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into
which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed
into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been
able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that
rôle the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?"
he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to
be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be."
And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that
he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing
quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the
truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent
youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them
into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of
being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of
his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who
certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a
passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the
last man gave out from sheer exhaustion."
For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his
work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an
increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly
have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We
remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the _Quaker
City_ excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically
meaningless to those who read his letter: "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.... An accusing conscience gives me peace
only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it
but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by
the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to
penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the
change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the
Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from
"art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and
duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the
first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier,
"before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river
itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his
task explaining, in that connection, the difference between
"theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just
so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more
so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the
'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has
become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that
descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an
absolutely certain financial success--how repellant it became to him as
time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the
self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell
that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't
have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light,
and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and
propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down
went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he
had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief?
"The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to
finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A
Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it.
He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted
child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a
charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the
moment in the approval of his wife.
We have seen--and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his
arrested development--that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for
literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What
is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in
his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think--over-expressed
it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so--in something he wrote once
of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as
we say, more than for aught else whatever--cared for them with that kind
of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond
votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a
refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect
freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark
Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My
right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write
this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it--no, I mean 1,000,000--next
fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't
have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have
been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost
cynical indifference, of insolence even.
Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a
significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the
creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine,
"his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on
his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far
behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and
it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his
best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his
judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and
certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can
take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything
but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with
such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object
in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had
approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the
craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how
exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!--"possibly the book may
not sell, but that is nothing--it was written for love." But more
striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven
times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of
preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation
and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously
exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in
that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully.
What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for
"Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he
had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own
fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular
pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them
anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from
the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious
ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of
indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey
of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve
years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his
delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine,
the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying--that spirit which
came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly
gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which
tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the
dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a _réchauffé_ for children,
for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no
doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely
treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the
book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never
known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains
in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship.
If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine
the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same
time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive
stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession,
have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think
of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was,
says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw....
On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably
would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence
due?--"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all
but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with
all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent,
prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in
one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get
a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his
"laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform,
and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought
always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice
of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have
said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in
fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his
essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the
_raconteur_ of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is
just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of
mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of
the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a
boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land
because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him
reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had
remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To
tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper
places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at
last--oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control,
to spring that final effect of horror!--there was something worthy of a
man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in
his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable
through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and
training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age
of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it,
to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had
Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential
authority, with that old negro _raconteur_, that old pilot of the
Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark
Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his
best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even,
the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as
often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had
expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at
least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at
least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot:
in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring
masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and
thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass
muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the
others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient,
inherited folk-skill--he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist
ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his
_métier_, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever
more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going
his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done.
Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual
consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had
remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural
genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with
which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he
found open before him.
It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life
should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it
now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and
why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The
autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on
hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because
they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore,
that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it
is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either
internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until
it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open
and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary
number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the
surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which
is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the
American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial
success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse,
characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find
him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an
absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885,
at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained
his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you
can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had
"assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he
had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was
the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually
recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote _con
amore_ were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not
only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something
in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he
was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men--that was the
public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business
men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the
phrase, "children of a larger growth"?
Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he
seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer"
could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly
"Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers.
But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom
Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to
the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book
is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he
associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a
publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'"
and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic
consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its
real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously,
all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious
Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent,
though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it.
Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is
clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys
through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its
bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de
Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with
love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this
happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says
that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best
book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown
in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to
a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it
on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One
might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a
hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays
which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of
the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift
stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering
itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books
alone--these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering
on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the
ground.