They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. "Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party—in Rome—he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. Very humiliating, and also very tragic!
Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to seek.
Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in 1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire—we know it as much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: 'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself—publish it first in England—ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to smoke the pipe of truth.
Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man—is it remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of creating standards of his own and living up to them?
"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," wrote Mark Twain, years later. "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." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color—had he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul?
"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any possibility have occurred to him toresolveto become brave. Hecould not originate the idea—it had to come to him from theoutside."
The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic plea in self-extenuation?
"Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ."IBSEN:Letter to Brandes,1870.
"Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ."
IBSEN:Letter to Brandes,1870.
And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, from the outset of his life, subjected itself!
Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood.
We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. "To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome—and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And having accepted the rôle of the opulent householder, he threw into it as much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work.
Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," "predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things—but then my household expenses are something almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his "disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, "he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. There werealwaysguests; they were coming and going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a 'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"—after a while he virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his mother—"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life—above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy!
To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use—not to mention the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work—his impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"—that he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred million dollars.
Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"—for this he had, in fact, become—he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of authors—he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, "reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, "is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He "liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him—"here I am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that?
For Mark Twain was not simply living the bourgeois life now; he had adopted all the values and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, position, wealth had become his gods and the tribal customs of a nation of traders identical in his mind with the laws of the universe.
He was, after all, a literary man; yet as a publisher he was more oblivious to the advancement of literature than the ordinary man of the trade. His policy was the pursuit of "big" names, and that alone. What were the works issued or projected under his direction by the firm of Charles L. Webster and Co.? The memoirs of General Grant, General Sheridan, General McClellan, General Hancock and Henry Ward Beecher, the "Life of Pope Leo XIII," and a book by the King of the Sandwich Islands. It was not even greatness outside of literature that he sought for, it was mere notoriety: one would say that in his lifelong passion for getting his name and fame associated with those of other men who were secure of the suffrages of the multitude Mark Twain was almost consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees—money, power, glory—vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever held. It was not the old Germany that he admired—never that! It was Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut Yankee," had set out to make mediæval England a "going concern" could hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that phenomenon in all history.
Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and circumstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters to his assailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it was in his power and his fame.
Thus it came to pass, in these middle years of his life, that while in the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In 1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he was entitled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the framers of the American Constitution. But we can see from this how far Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the colors of the privileged class which the new industrial régime had brought forth and of which his own material success had made him a member.
His essential instinct, as we know, was antagonistic to all this; his essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, placed him naturally in the opposition with all the great European writers of his age. Turn to his letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!—and not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, "Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and ambassadors dancing attendance on him!—how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an article passionately advocating that the salaries of American ambassadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement.
As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book. As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to assert itself against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore when he found me in deep water"—this man had given too many hostages to the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for in the world, the only man I would give a d—— for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his Sunday School class, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated.
So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the American nation in the hollow of his hand—the nation, or rather the epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home with his public—he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor.
Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a naïve worship of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular rôle and had forestalled what Mr. Croly calls the distrust and aversion of the pioneer democracy for the man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement, he drew up a list of his occupations and found that he had been a printer, a pilot, a soldier, a miner in several kinds, a reporter, a lecturer and a publisher; also "an author for twenty years and an ass for fifty-five."
It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other business man—to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make money because other people made money and to make more money than other people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry,thenI am done with literature and all other bosh—that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and in the other that he had not lived it—for certainly his marriage had not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public! Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business enterprise and of letters.
"If Sam had got that pocket"—we remember the saying of his old California comrade—"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of itsdébâcle, Mark Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, "have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the material rewards it brought him.
How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion—At 12:20 this afternoon a line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was doneautomatically—instantly—perfectly. This is indeed the first line of movable types that everwasperfectly spaced and perfectly justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well—dizzy, stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, too far away—as even his financial interest was too shallow, after all—to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age for having produced Walt Whitman.
"How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?"JOHN STUART MILL.
"How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?"
JOHN STUART MILL.
We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work as a writer.
"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I was the kind of person thatdoesthings. Does them and reflects afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition of immaturity.
Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a really royal stair—leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was "planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or rather still, Tom Sawyer?
Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social tendencies that had so spectacular adénouementwithin four years of his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's funeral—"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, "will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of it—indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was "entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history."
And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all.
And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped æsthetic sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in heaven":—"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to have recognized the sign—the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did he like? In painting, Landseer—"and the way he makes animals absolute flesh and blood—insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the beginning—to my mind—their music made all other vocal music cheap; and that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, Kipling—"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbô," which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was wholly non-æsthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's "Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and Thanatopsianism—in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the most primitive form of æsthetic emotion, combined with just those tints of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence.
Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his own juvenility freely registered itself.
"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, "but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even."
I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it.
Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe.
Unused, half-used, misused—was ever anything like that energy? Mr. Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in 1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family censor—"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death—how many others were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions—how like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of authority!—was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk—was it garrulous, was it not rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind?
An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty—could there be a surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art.
Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is—where shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; "but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine articles and books—and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, impossible performance"—no doubt because he had been able to write the whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold.
In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of sustained interest in his work—his lack of interest in literature itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper—is not that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here again there was a positive note—his lifelong preoccupation with grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly verbal!—"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," "General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of "Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well?
Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican—all the galleries.... We examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its pet feature—there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the American people of his time were simply the English middle class transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream of the "land of Egypt"—Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage.
How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief gifts—transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," "Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the Mississippi"—and even there it is the river itself and not its human nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his imagination.
We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins—a fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": "Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal experience.
Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to write for theAtlanticand it is only then that fresh memories rise in his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even "Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and slashed! "His proof-sheets came back toThe Atlantic," says Mr. Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder."