MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR
"To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is
nobler and less trouble."
_Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._
And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant
Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he
was in revolt against a rôle which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust
upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc"
anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark
Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous
writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other
than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it,
we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic
development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this
career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that
found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his
decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious
and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige
had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark
Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and
what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and
at the same time achieved such ample material rewards.
It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we
have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front;
and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency
who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a
humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he
was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of
Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V.
Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte,
sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of
chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous
cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society
required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems
to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a
distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition--the
battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it
seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men,
when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is
the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind
it."
Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark
Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that
in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found
that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his
diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do _hate_ to go
back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from
mining. "We fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada
as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman
say, the other day, that it was the 'd----dest country under the
sun'--and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never
rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green
thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the
purest--most unadulterated and uncompromising--_sand_." And as with the
setting--so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine,
"the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on
him": more than once he found it necessary--this young man of
twenty-eight--"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat
Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs
and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel."
That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own
testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d----n San Francisco style
of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made
his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands--"God, what a contrast with
California and the Washoe"!--ever sweet and blessed in his memory.
Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was
this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also
call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which
also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of
his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he
was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was
always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill
his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr.
Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic
waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of
the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam
swear."--Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was
living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation.
Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of
pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life.
It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with
domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that
sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as
we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was,
nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or
satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were
civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom
civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable
avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which
their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore,
they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were
blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance,
that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children
were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how
hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining
population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex
tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single
monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which
kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse
in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually
impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept
a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to
conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask
of a rough good-fellowship that found expression mainly in the nervously
and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the
gambling-hell. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which
peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed,
quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the very pick and choice of
the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing
It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or
decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed
hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon
the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof
of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed.
Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that
life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the
fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The
gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an
outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of
masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the
intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the
human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering
one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps
the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was
almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the
day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so
common--that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the
newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his
old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated
duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of
chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser
degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the
pioneers?
But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that
individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and
preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering
itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but,
victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not
withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from
openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already
pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers
in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were
always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in
calling a relief from restraint.
We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were
subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the
most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most
complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circumstances
where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most
general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was
the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a
life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the
necessity of making money, of succeeding--the same impulse had brought
him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain
was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from
attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised
and because to have done so would have required just those expressions
of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other
hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of
all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those
outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his
companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never
"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged
physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them.
"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty
years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have
lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still
retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that
would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out
into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in
the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his
instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his dignity had had
to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a
life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he
became a universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of
individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship of public
opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada.
Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some
kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet,
since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining,
had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the
artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which,
far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark
Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in
order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he
acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his
individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading,
his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different"
or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how
urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society
where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself
by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his
profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing
at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see
from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of
his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was
always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his
humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men
laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short,
of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief
in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those
acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of
consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious
jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will
hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he
could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those
conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this
vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time
keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming
his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a
relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose
investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have,
the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of
expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic
effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke
or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely
safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist
in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of
those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of
one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than
the editors had spoken each of the other")--his comrades were able,
without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own
exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred
and the destructive desires buried under the attitude of good-fellowship
that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain
himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to
maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the
position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader.
For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular
ferocity. The very titles of his Western I sketches reveal their general
character: "The Dutch Nick Massacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing
Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Cæsar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in
the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his
labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the
doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the
phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to
kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead
Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape
hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It
began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a
special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality;
but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was
"unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general,
the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known,
in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt
officials--we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own
painfully honest brother Orion--were frankly afraid of him. "He was very
far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any
way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even
from trying to be a humorist!
Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik
Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town,
found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all
that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down
upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not
enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man
with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same
way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own
childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of
Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged
by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his
antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of
satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest
of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in
him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his
pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated
and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike
he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is
the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in
corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of
things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not
seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was
an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure,
their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change
things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a
counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very
moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive
instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to
express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have
led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an
end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as
human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired
Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief
they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could
not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been
compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He
had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a
campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine
says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As
a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote
criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the
result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco
papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a
correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we
are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long
restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the
"humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in
California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from
expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in
short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to
remain a humorist.
In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover
the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who
found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter
of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no
value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same
trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech."
Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he
had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps
we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor
consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't
know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as
surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists
of a sort who lack the courage to admit it.
Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I
say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to
carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of _The Galaxy,_ to
which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct
a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad"
his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a
humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have
already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the
pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the
rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business
men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West.
The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for
ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national
demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by
Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at
last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact.
I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the
Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of
Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly
homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we
have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile
because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or
restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us
feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile _because_!
In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The
"cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all
his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and
as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far
from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in
these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and
even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark
Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches
in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers,
lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small
harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances
of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive;
but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says,
all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the
same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than
the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's
humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the
same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is
to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because"
that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us
from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to
murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from
the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us
to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a
phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the
last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is
the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the
demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he
made upon his environment, had become, _pari passu_, progressively more
stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as
barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why
perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment
favorable for a régime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who
has risen," the typical American, himself a business man?
Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of
succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but
complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the
stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general
"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been
characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation
was practically organized--by a sort of common consent--on the plan of
a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed
to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and æsthetic
development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised
the success of the business régime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark
Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to
the efficiency of this business régime, because it helped to maintain
the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as
it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the
Western pioneer.
As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business
man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the
"strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an
aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he
find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way
and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an
aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know,
diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the
creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic
coöperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts
for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that
expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map."
Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional
freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a
retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action:
consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him,
confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On
the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course,
everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration,
reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and
responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual
and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor
does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought--and
especially irreverent toward them!--when they gave him a seat below the
salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and
absurd everything of a spiritual, æsthetic and intellectual nature the
recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the
smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as
we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at
antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an
infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being.
That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a
hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the
spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality,
involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader
to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional
stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all
these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure
in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much
as the pioneer.
Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether
they corroborate this argument.
In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself
seated directly behind a young girl:
How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she
would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own
thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer
pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy
dreams,--no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit
still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of
a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young
figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the
gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep,
tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy
cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy
rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and
so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did
mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red
lips parted, and out leaped her thought,--and with such a
guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just _know_
I've got five hundred fleas on me!"
This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its
tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all
the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them
so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in
hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually,
prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting
into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a
pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by
a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself
evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no
longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a
butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in
the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to
his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions.
Another example, the famous "œsophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph
of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story":
It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The
lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn,
hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge
provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that
have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together;
the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow
flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep
of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous
flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty
sky a solitary œsophagus slept upon motionless wing;
everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of
God.
We scarcely need Mr. Paine's assurance that "the warm light and luxury
of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its
various accessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most
careless reader will accept the œsophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's
sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation
of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and
thus divert the reader's feeling for it.
To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life
of the man with an eye single to the main chance--that, one would almost
say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain's humor. In almost every one
of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house
down in order to roast his pig--he destroys, that is to say, an entire
complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single
sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are
manifestations of just that personal, æsthetic or moral distinction
which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish.
Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous speech on
General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain's humorous
assault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the
human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of
the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success
of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the
final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a
democratic régime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition
of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the
fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a
business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is,
however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious
schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd,"
says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather
hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him
into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark
Twain's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that
in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for
this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook
his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To
exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our
humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from
any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be
abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee"
was an assault, not upon a social institution, but upon the principle of
beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd
pioneer business man.
How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The
Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological
moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of
industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become
obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it
was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe!
Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author's
own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything
of which the author's totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were
ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be
ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual
development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that
would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too
costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not
only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate
pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as
Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and
all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind
were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land,
yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was
notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial
philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in
civilization, of modern America. "I find your people--your best people,
I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only
talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's
novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there
seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in
their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of
the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of
cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The
Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman's "Leaves of
Grass," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one
hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Grass,"
having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its
whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that
is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the
individual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a
commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true
spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring
every traveling foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure of
its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so
far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and
the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far
as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing
satisfaction of Americans with a banker's paradise in which, as long as
it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled.
So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain's humor. I
think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought
him. And are we not already in a position to see why the rôle of
humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it,
why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own
development?
Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of
the artist. It meant the suppression of his æsthetic desires, the
degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How
can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end
becoming the victim of his own habit?
I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved
the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and
delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love
for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for
charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the
Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish
knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands
on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing
something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business
man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation
of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he
continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more
advanced æsthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one
of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the
irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable:
one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually
"taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty
becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of
art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven."
In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions
of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul.
Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective
coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by
stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself
a scarred child.
He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day
come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will
detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by
laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has
unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money,
persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal
humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but
only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do
you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was
satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great
purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of
which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was
he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he
lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the
"sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his
proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of
moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual
position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating
stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the
indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the
energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became
but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his
"high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by
saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as
fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of
harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that
world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked
everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an
endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to maintain that
equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out
of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can
appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine's comment: "Perhaps, after
all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief
life-saver."