MUSTERED OUT
"... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the
others were all still asleep." DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI.
And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly
liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him
and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his
defeat.
"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday
speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe
no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a
time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your
term, well or less well, and you are mustered out."
What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon
his life?
"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi,"
"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived
in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the
public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we
print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries
and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot
had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once
and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the
creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and
he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write
frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of
Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you
ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose
opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic
naïveté of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought
or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential
priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross
and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate,
immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt
contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your
immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined
to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found
out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is
true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence
of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so
doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far
from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering
forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of
youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase;
you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of
the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain
thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out."
His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy
years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and
awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have
oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon
your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck
Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with
Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in
this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has
become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed,
unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant
growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in
matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of
national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches
now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played
this rôle in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the
clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain
perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation":
the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world
as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd
it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly
fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous
nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the
more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the
vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon
the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of
the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any
one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general
spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who
said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize
that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That passion for
the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient
earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything
essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was
always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of
thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three
times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a
watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the
farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the
gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own
career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the
sort of courage he described in his story "Luck."
"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so
little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak
out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he
continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same
seventy-first year to Twitchell. "I give you my word of honor
(privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my
conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it.
There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal
to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said
some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will
not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did
he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise
we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not
rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long
habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double
personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to
redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and
comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had
kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not
sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had
kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of
the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old
imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long
deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How
it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a
little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark
Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the
truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week
he found that he no longer had the strength.
Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to
Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing
for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and
have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance
to write a book without reserves--a book which should take account of no
one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes,
illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my
heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I
judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is
under way, now, and it _is_ a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book
was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing
it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his
desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil
upon the passion that possessed him. At once this craving reasserted
itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?"
He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his
friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he
felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire
still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind
on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a
mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path
out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he
writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden
emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous,
however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into
later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men
in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him":
there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth
now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth--anything that it would
hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored
the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother
Orion to write an autobiography that would spare nobody's feelings and
would let all the cats out of the bag: "Simply tell your story to
yourself, laying all hideousness utterly bare, reserving nothing," he
had told him. Let Orion do it! we can almost hear him whispering to
himself; and Orion had done it. "It wrung my heart," wrote Mr. Howells
of that astounding manuscript, "and I felt haggard after I had finished
it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had
found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was
himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as
Mr. Paine tells us, "a document in which his deeds and misdeeds, even
his moods and inmost thoughts, should be truly set down." To write such
a book now had become the ruling desire of his life. He had developed
what Mr. Paine calls "a passion for biography, and especially for
autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for
confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to
redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something
unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who
spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in
the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of
himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and
plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be
mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom,"
he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published,
"because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with
theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration;
you'll write it to Twitchell, because it will make him writhe and squirm
and break the furniture. When you are on fire with a good thing that's
indecent you won't waste it on Twitchell; you'll save it for Howells,
who will love it. As he will never see it you can make it really
indecenter than he could stand; and so no harm is done, yet a vast
advantage is gained." Was ever a more terrible flood piled up against
the sluice-gates of a human soul?
At last the gates open. Safely seated behind a proviso that it is not to
be published until he has been dead a century, Mark Twain begins his
autobiography. In the first flush he imagines that he is doing what he
has longed to do. "Work?" he said to a young reporter--the passage is to
be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my
seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six
hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published
in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish
and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall
continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It
is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some
folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons
mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is
something awful."
You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has
been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a
debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things
about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to
shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about
her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three
"playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but
still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and
Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright
campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in
Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitchell. He is going to
exact his pound of flesh for every one of that "long list of
humiliations"! But he is going to exact it like an Olympian. What is the
use of being old if you can't rise to a certain impersonality, a certain
universality, if you can't assume at last the prerogatives of the human
soul, lost, in its loneliness and its pathos, upon this little orb that
whirls amid the "swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of time and
space, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are
so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your
pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the
mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of
cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going
to have--what magnificently wicked fun!
You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own
redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book
it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And
what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy
occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are
going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were
published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were
carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in
reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it
in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the
courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his
soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among
the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_
gives us, we may assume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been
dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have
thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I
am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on
paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired
when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I
should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike
them out when I came to revise this book."
Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark
Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge
Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be
a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the
person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture
to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved
himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what
inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral
slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense
that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to
communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is
Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the
writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will
in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was
incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors.
There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the
Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities,
if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of
founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at
Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market
value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor;
but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was
not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without
the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his.
"It is noble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is
nobler to show others how to be good, and less trouble," which conveys,
in its cynicism, a profound sense of his own emptiness. He tempted the
fates when he published "What Is Man?" anonymously. If that book had had
a success of scandal, his conscience might have pricked him on to
publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge
of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually
shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably
have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was
received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _exposé_ of
philosophies which were no longer startlingly new." After that just,
that very generous public verdict--for the book is, in fact, quite
worthless except for the light it throws on Mark Twain--he must have
felt that he had no further call to adopt the unpopular rôle of a
Mephistopheles.
With all the more passion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the
repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that
civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen
from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference
and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported
by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm
heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and
oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of
the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable
corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in
South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines;
Leopold of Belgium was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the
Congo; and the allied powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering
the Chinese." The human race had always been behaving badly, but Mark
Twain was in a frame of mind to perceive it now. Was he the founder of
the great school of muck-rakers? He, at any rate, the most sensitive,
the most humane of men, rode forth to the encounter now, the champion of
all who, like himself, had been in bondage. It is impossible to ignore
this personal aspect of his passionate sympathy with suffering and
weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it
was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone
aroused his passion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic
attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following
the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his
book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and
"A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against
bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him.
Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his
"Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the
forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit.
Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who
have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the
sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark
Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who,
equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of Juarès and the
volunteer of 1914, has proved that scepticism and courage are capable of
a superb rapport. Mark Twain had not been able to rise to that level,
and the sentimentality of his own study of Joan of Arc shows it. In his
animus against the judges of Joan one perceives, however, a savage and
despairing defense of the misprized poet, the betrayed hero, in himself.
The outstanding fact about this later effort of Mark Twain's is that his
energy is concentrated almost exclusively in attacks of one kind or
another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly
destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a
will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my
feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on
paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become
definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his
great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can
doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks!
Had he not, as early as 1881, assailed even the postage rates; had he
not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department
on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told,
when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary,
when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible
passion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle
pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day
and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not
a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I
have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end
to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says?
Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human
race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was
it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for
means of easement and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian
Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy
frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack
upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the
failure in himself.
And this failure was the failure of the artist in him.
Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy
in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life
which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire
except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel,
and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old
masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with
anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it
and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I
have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to
do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort
would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what
had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious
sycophant of the crass materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The
Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime
creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator
of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an
impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born
artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist
destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in
the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious
he is, even this early, of all æsthetic pretensions! What a fierce
grudge he has against those who lay claim to a certain affection for the
perverse mysteries of high art! They want to get into the dress circle,
he says, by a lie; that's what they're after! The "Slave Ship," for all
Ruskin's fine phrases, reminds him of a cat having a fit in a platter of
tomatoes. Etcetera, etcetera. Here we have the familiar figure of the
peasant who imagines a woman must be a prostitute because she wears a
low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark
Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him;
he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is
the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to
desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp
unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously
desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then,
why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to
produce only one himself, and that a failure.
We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative
life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates
nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a
machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the
animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he
said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say
nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of
the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is
astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a
retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could
have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind.
But Mark Twain does not write like a credulous business man, indulging
his hobby; he does not even write like a lawyer, feverishly checking off
the proofs of that intoxicating evidence: he is defiant, he exults in
the triumph of his own certitude, he stamps on Shakespeare, he insults
him, he delights in pouring vulgar scorn upon that ingenuous bust in
Stratford Church, with its "deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle
expression of a bladder." And why? Because the evidence permits him to
believe that Shakespeare was an ignorant yokel. Bacon was the man, Bacon
knew everything, Bacon was a lawyer--see what Macaulay says! Macaulay,
heaven bless us all!--therefore, Bacon wrote the plays. Is this Mark
Twain speaking, the author of the sublime illiteracies of "Huckleberry
Finn," who had been himself most the artist when he was least the
sophisticated citizen? It is, and he is speaking in character. He who
asserted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training
makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce
that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written.
But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel
Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had
not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can
hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to
follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession
revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on
faith.
How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of
his, that drab mass of crude speculation of which he said so confidently
that it was "like the sky--you can't break through anywhere." How much
it meant to him, the thought that man is a mere machine, an
irresponsible puppet, entitled to no demerit for what he has failed to
do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in
Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius
is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its
eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior
circumstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life,
upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his
intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for
the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe
with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and
unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no
outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no
outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a
valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would
have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced
something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences,
associations and training. In France he would have produced something
better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and
training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to
Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is
enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we
can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking
reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his
half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as
"large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age.
Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that
we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order
to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us,
destroy us, we embrace them with an _amor fati_, to escape from the
contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside
circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he
wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would
not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave
who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact,
finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the
possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself.
The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly
temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains,
nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep
emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it
honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the
slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and
thirst for freedom.
Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential
force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in
Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that
fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If
the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in
fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for
greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued
against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will:
he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a
will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose
regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no
spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where
success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is
a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place
of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the
first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be
weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that
Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it
is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How
well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain!
"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human
being is under training. It is his human environment which influences
his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his
road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself
shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval
he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his
aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He
creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the
way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the
tragedy of it.
Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark
Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human
mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine
anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a
single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind
from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind
carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which
act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All
day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and
without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9
thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before
his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain
cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as
the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and
controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental
machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of
ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any
help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the
multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen
minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases.
It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite
of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely
independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better
have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark
Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling,
chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks
and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't
listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and
wretched in the morning." A swarming mass of dissociated fragments of
personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost,
that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in
these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with
each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book
regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch
inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal
conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the
end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul!
The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary
psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute assurance.
And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express
through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I
generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not
those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these
"three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me
at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in
the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life
that has been unfolded in these pages.
"There is never a month passes," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being
in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a
living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about
those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought
that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I
am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell
whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.
"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to
the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am
always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be
funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only
making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they
commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing
there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house."
I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas
that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark
Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to
think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought
of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow,"
the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself
inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second
dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing
self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream
worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always
"trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has
lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great
surrender.
Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment
when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda
packet:
"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which
the title-rôle of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of
this now and then when it had passed, and it seemed to amuse him. The
other was a discomfort: a college assembly was attempting to confer upon
him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at
me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out
of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't
want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always
expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'"
No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have
had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him;
but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for
good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess
alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity
of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said
Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks
and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have
ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born
artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that
he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be
"original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship
even over his neckties--the artist who, longing to look like an orchid,
has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily!
And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about
on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most
ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king,
the conquering hero, the darling of the masses, praised and adored by
all, he is unable even to reach the cynic's paradise, that vitriolic
sphere which has, after all, a serenity of its own. The playboy to the
end, divided between rage and pity, cheerful in his self-contempt, an
illusionist in the midst of his disillusion, he is the symbol of the
creative life in a country where "by the goodness of God, we have those
three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of
conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is
the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own
conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He
was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that
has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for
missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says
John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic,
"who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of
things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the
end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability
begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new
turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces
of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confrères
have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask
yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and
walk the stage as poets do.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, by Van Wyck Brooks