LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN
"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence
of ladies."
_A Double-Barrelled Detective Story_.
"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your
works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political
tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain
himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant
intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle which he was, if one may say
so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr.
Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with
Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes,
Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator,
that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him
thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that
extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance
of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the
wish for the deed?
What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds
up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the
inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is
Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the
obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up to the measure
on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic,
intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the
intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism
of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is
embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely
conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain
cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he
did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government
his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly
speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and
government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil
community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view
of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes
for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the
fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so?
Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social
life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of
our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own
humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the
support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities
and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw
bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else
begin."
It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be
sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his
nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never,
despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all,
he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand
for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so
involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he
could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his
friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to
him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen
that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great
impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even
feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the
wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead
of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and
even flattered it.
If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to
be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the
puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author
of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of
sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to
divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his
generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric
clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled
away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature.
But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are
beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in
assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills
out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been.
When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small
change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty
aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos
of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see
that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he
says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity
toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct
without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing
from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his
father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's
a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He
delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms
as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after
to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who
is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as
impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at
night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One
was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't
say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was
interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle
Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and
it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of
interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the
continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages
indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior
cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the
satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can
substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has
abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark
Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his
instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious,
political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in
private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties,
vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I
hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself,
I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave
conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made
progress--the first progress in 'ages and ages'--colossal progress. In
what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which
add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But
the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The
materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that
there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was
before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is
a vast change (due to them) in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and
all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme
ideal--all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations
named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the
world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This
lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle,
dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of
Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that
he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the
great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly,
that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his
friends were the unconscious agents of the business régime, bent upon
deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have
seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering?
Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was
perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed
into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what
did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country
some of these days when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the
spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich
writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark
Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary
confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the
financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path
of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a
brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read
'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a
cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked
on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those
days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880
or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West,
excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to
eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry
Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by
the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great
centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906.
If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have
been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested
for his first important book--"The New Pilgrim's Progress"--was regarded
in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing
Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only
when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed
to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but
loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same
gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates:
it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose
"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is
obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to
attack them?
His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it
is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches,"
that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the
frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a
sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the
readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a
friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going
to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not
going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make
trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he
could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky
note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example,
that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of
the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men"
lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the
case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not
noticing these little spots on the American sun?
In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems
frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen
that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief
embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been
the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of
speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are
all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and
generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and
politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there
are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed
out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly
animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact
the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand
old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its
devasting irony about every American institution save family
life--Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education
and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's
final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet
the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth
lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain
number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to
redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so--for the story
was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford--by
making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up
young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the
softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he,
for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had
the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner?
"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but
had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He
welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint
authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a
return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life;
Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the
sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one
might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the
West.
Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an
accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was
too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this
earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg"--not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever
again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of
industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great
Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as
"a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we
know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had
once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain,
"that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too
often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that
having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels
backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he
feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the
seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth
century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century
France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The
Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again
the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a
contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the
"Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark
Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King
Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on
corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he
not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who
are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's
biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew,
begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form
that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to
estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes,
in his private memoranda--"do right and you will be conspicuous."
Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's
intention and failure in his predestined rôle, the "Connecticut Yankee"
itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the
most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works.
Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in
writing it.
What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he
says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for
America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their
sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to
me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good
intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level
of manhood in turn."
No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have
blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of
him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet.
Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating
gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always
have been slightly irritating--he was irritating even at home, and how
much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to
dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw
red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon
General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America,
an attack upon America _and_ upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark
Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book
as the publisher of General Grant, upon his _amour-propre_ as the
countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like
a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a
typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're
another!"--just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul
Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to
put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis
and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of
the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a
frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could
not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities
like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't
tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all
that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered
both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole
English race, indeed, to come and knock them off.
Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a
satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in
the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him,
unconsciously, into a sort of _bouleversement_ of all his actual
personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds
himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up
the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher
level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but
to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In
short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to
do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee
mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours
ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of
the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were
sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages.
Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's
genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did
not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle
years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his
letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was
absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can
see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A
Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old
Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and
Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to
Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and
thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear
date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my
word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there
was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I
to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry;
there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this
progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of
Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that
he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he
proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to
those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something
rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a
land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being
possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up
to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the
inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average
rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous
wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the
seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about
that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected
from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it
might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of
space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he
calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there
is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace--_the approval of
his neighbors and the public_. And perhaps there is something which he
dreads more than he dreads pain--the _disapproval_ of his neighbors and
the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the
disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their
approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous
letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by
deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only
wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in
even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated
classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always
hunted for bigger game--the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to
instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can
get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to
"pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its
objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles
of simple folk! They are the most successful of all.
The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark
Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection
and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he
records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here
if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr.
Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its
institutions"--its institutions, observe--"its fair rural aspects, he
had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days;
against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so
admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons
for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed
him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first
English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many
of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English
readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark
Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class
of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that
Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful
heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say?
But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned,
as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid
its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their
hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he,
merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately
desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have
already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of
this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was
this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely
personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in
reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark
that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was
his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public
figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson,
in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his
responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of
humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with
him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was
measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without
hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like
the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people
immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the
situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford
neighbors, who had taken him into _their_ hearts and homes?--that was
the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could
not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned
enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize--he was
boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to
satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize
not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won.
Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine
tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was
badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was
highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the
"Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business
with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author,
we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the
publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be
popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have
been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the
top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the
exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial
pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make
King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?--
"Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck
and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest
field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the
English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting
the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the
great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks
neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he
wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain
had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the
spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the
magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else,
less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also.
"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it."
Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that
remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable
only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long
deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom
Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be
read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find
him adding: "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." Tell the truth or trump--but get the
trick!
Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal
processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion,
that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success
and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two
letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who
was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive
feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which,
as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings
and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable
way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for
his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody
contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that,
Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to _mail_ this letter; he understands
that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no
harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a
volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his
crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he
would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one
writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a
very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot
embers in it here and there."
Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask
himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he
accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the
priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the
accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and
cannot employ it.
Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark
Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he
finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to
dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905.
To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the
premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the
most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did,
that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would
have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been
arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send:
To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should
be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those
illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled,
obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the
Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war
into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all
respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I
taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to
modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it.
MARK.
DEAR COLONEL--No, this is a love-feast; when you call a
lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK.
And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that
he announced he was going to show it to the Czar:
To COLONEL HARVEY.--I am still a cripple, otherwise I should
be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the
illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing
but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war
with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty
centuries history will not get done admiring these men who
attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved
it. MARK TWAIN.
Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful
fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To
Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,'
stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had
told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege.
'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up
and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head.
'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men
can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.'
He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he
was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions
and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind!
And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in
this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment
to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible
playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars
up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to
support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation."
Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain
was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes
to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far
more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was
always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to
America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his
aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him
a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious
wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into
the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir
in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position
carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders
to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal
ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor,
was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of
reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who
appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children.
"The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more
intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the
affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and
punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure
punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a
cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts
which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all
respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I
think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass,
boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect
upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or
Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an
assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of
"brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most
pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer.
This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the
Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who
attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other
hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what
everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society
Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but
monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who
took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in
actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it
appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because,
as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the
nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass,
the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could
not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the
spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been,
for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the
spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was
personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr.
Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to
print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion
behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was
the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents
Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by
disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered
the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own
genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a
whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold
quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding.
Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old
age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared
to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's
biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled
satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an
impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those
merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance
upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him
to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer
interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his
childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma";
he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of
his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he
imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies.
He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought
in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes,
"needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have
done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we
see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and
Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr.
Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he
never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The
religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he
meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't
he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those
theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes
about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from
his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his
environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think
of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make
people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with
infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to
curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes
in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long,
in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells
Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs
and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D.
2006--which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment
of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006,"
saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so
far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs
one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the
trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the
publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk.
Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered
life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had
found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth
and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The
absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous
conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's
pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven
is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote
in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he
dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a
single feature in it that he _actually values_. It consists--utterly
and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on
the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do
not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are
singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about
two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in
a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not
many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have
variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you
have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented
a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is
like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too
rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the
tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray,
in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent
impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of
"Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error,
something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the
civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the
illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what
civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in
his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a
world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen
it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That
Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says,
"until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating
sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut
Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood,
and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted
nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim
of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of
life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol
promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that
is pathology.
Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was
always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he
oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture
of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification
or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the
satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an
ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion,
never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also
that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the
works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000
Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr.
Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a
man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and
looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a
billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it
with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might
say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect
it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have
the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the
picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is
able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple
contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never
completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they
invariably led into this _cul-de-sac_. If life is really futile, then
writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make
life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility
is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it
might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it _is_
full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present
sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never
attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in
the air.