The ordeal of Mark Twain

Presented to the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY

by the

ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY

1980

THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN

547b5

,e<>

THE ORDEAL OF !

MARK TWAIN

BY

VAN WYGK BROOKS

ON

M Think it over, dear B — / A man's gifts art
not a property : they are a duty."

—Ibsen's Letters

5 4 7 b 5

LONDONi MfILLIA.M HEINEMANN

7S
133/

h
Mi

Printed in the United States of America

TO

E. S. B.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAQJD

I. Inthoductory: Mark Twain's Despair . . 1

II. The Candidate for Life 26

III. The Gilded Age 61

IV. In the Crucible 73

V. The Candidate for Gentility 100

VI. Everybody's Neighbor 128

VII. The Playboy in Letters 148

VIII. Those Extraordinary Twins 178

IX. Mark Twain's Humor ........ 198

X. Let Somebody Else Begin 221

XI. Mustered Out 246

vu

THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN

THE ORDEAL OF
MARK TWAIN

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR

"What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the
deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the
race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for
the same reason. " — Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's books.

TO those who are interested in American life and
letters there has been no question of greater signifi-
cance, during the last few years, than the pessimism of
Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his
own friends and contemporaries were rather inclined
to make light of his oft-expressed belief that man is the
meanest of the animals and life a tragic mistake.

For some time before his death Mark Twain had
appeared before the public in the role less of a laughing
philosopher than of a somewhat gloomy prophet of mod-
ern civilization. But he was old and he had suffered
many misfortunes and the progress of society is not a
matter for any one to be very jubilant about: to be
gloomy about the world is a sort of prerogative of those
who have lived long and thought much. The public
that had grown old with him could hardly, therefore,
accept at its face value a point of view that seemed to
be contradicted by so many of the facts of Mark Twain's
life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him inti-

4 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

expected to take the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously,
and all the more because he totally refuted the old and
popular notion that humorists are always melancholy.
I have already quoted the remark he made about his
temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life,
four months before his own death. It is borne out by
all the evidence of all his years. He was certainly not
one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue natures, those
June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day
long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He
was an August nature, given to sudden storms and
thunder; his atmosphere was charged with electricity.
But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered,
and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned.
"What a child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to
the very end!" He was indeed a child in the buoyancy
of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter
where they are or what happens to them, who have the
organ of Hope preposterously developed, who are
endowed with an uncongealable sanguine temperament!"
he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is,"
he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature
on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and uni-
formly and unceasingly happy than I am I defy the
world to produce him and prove him." And it seems
always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in
his triumphs on the platform or indulging his ' * rainbow-
hued impulses" on paper, we see him again and again,
as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he
was expounding the gospel of copyright to the members
of Congress assembled, "happy and wonderfully ex-
cited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in his
seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daugh-
ter's death: "Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy
again? Yes. And soon. For I know my tempera-
ment"?
And his physical health was just what one might

Mark Twain's Despair 5

expect from this, from his immense vitality. He was
subject to bronchial colds and he had intermittent
attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his
health appears to have been as perfect as his energy was
inexhaustible. "I have been sick a-bed several days,
for the first time in 21 years," he writes in 1875; from
all one gathers he might have made the same statement
twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at
fifty, at sixty, at seventy — during that extraordinary
period, well within the memory of people who are still
young, when he had solved his financial difficulties by
going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine
says, "like a debutante in her first season," — the days
when people called him "the Belle of New York": "By
half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had danced all
those people down — and yet was not tired, merely
breathless. I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes.
Up at 9 and presently at work on this letter to you."
And again, the next year, his sixtieth year, when he
had been playing billiards with H. H. Rogers, until
Rogers looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you
ever get tired?": "I was able to say that I had for-
gotten what that feeling was like. Don't you remember
how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at
the villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to
bed unfatigued at 3, I get up fresh and fine six hours
later. I believe I have taken only one daylight nap
since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testi-
mony of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out,
during the last five years of his life when, even at
seventy-four, he was still playing billiards "9 hours a
day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human
being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was
comparatively a young man, and by no I nTis an
invalid ; but many a time, far in the night, when i was
ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh
and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment

4 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

expected to take the pessimism of Mark Twain seriously,
and all the more because he totally refuted the old and
popular notion that humorists are always melancholy.
I have already quoted the remark he made about his
temperament in one of the darkest moments of his life,
four months before his own death. It is borne out by
all the evidence of all his years. He was certainly not
one of those radiant, sunny, sky-blue natures, those
June-like natures that sing out their full joy, the day
long, under a cloudless heaven. Far from that! He
was an August nature, given to sudden storms and
thunder; his atmosphere was charged with electricity.
But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered,
and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned.
"What a child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to
the very end!" He was indeed a child in the buoyancy
of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter
where they are or what happens to them, who have the
organ of Hope preposterously developed, who are
endowed with an uncongealable sanguine temperament!"
he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is,"
he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature
on all this footstool who is more thoroughly and uni-
formly and unceasingly happy than I am I defy the
world to produce him and prove him." And it seems
always to have been so. Whether he is "revelling" in
his triumphs on the platform or indulging his ' ' rainbow-
hued impulses" on paper, we see him again and again,
as Mr. Paine saw him in Washington in 1906 when he
was expounding the gospel of copyright to the members
of Congress assembled, "happy and wonderfully ex-
cited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in his
seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daugh-
ter's death: "Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy
again? Yes. And soon. For I know my tempera-
ment"?

And his physical health was just what one might

Mark Twain's Despair 5

expect from this, from his immense vitality. He was
subject to bronchial colds and he had intermittent
attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his
health appears to have been as perfect as his energy was
inexhaustible. "I have been sick a-bed several days,
for the first time in 21 years/ ' he writes in 1875; from
all one gathers he might have made the same statement
twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at
fifty, at sixty, at seventy — during that extraordinary
period, well within the memory of people who are still
young, when he had solved his financial difficulties by
going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine
says, "like a debutante in her first season," — the days
when people called him "the Belle of New York": "By
half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had danced all
those people down — and yet was not tired, merely
breathless. I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes.
Up at 9 and presently at work on this letter to you."
And again, the next year, his sixtieth year, when he
had been playing billiards with H. H. Rogers, until
Rogers looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you
ever get tired?": "I was able to say that I had for-
gotten what that feeling was like. Don 't you remember
how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at
the villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to
bed unfatigued at 3, I get up fresh and fine six hours
later. I believe I have taken only one daylight nap
since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testi-
mony of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out,
during the last five years of his life when, even at
seventy-four, he was still playing billiards "9 hours a
day and 10 or 12 on Sunday": "In no other human
being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was
comparatively a young man, and by no , oyis an
invalid ; but many a time, far in the night, when l was
ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh
and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment

6 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

of beginning. He smoked and smoked continually, and
followed the endless track around the billiard-table
with the light step of youth. At 3 or 4 o'clock in the
morning he would urge just one more game, and would
taunt me for my weariness. I can truthfully testify
that never, until the last year of his life did he willingly
lay down the billiard-cue, or show the least suggestion
of fatigue.,,

Now this was the Mark Twain his contemporaries, his
intimates, had ever in their eyes, — this darling of all the
gods. No wonder they were inclined to take his view
of "the damned human race" as rather a whimsical
pose ; they would undoubtedly have continued to take it
so even if they had known, generally known, that he
had a way of referring in private to "God's most ele-
gant invention" as not only "damned" but also
"mangy." He was irritable, but literary men are
always supposed to be that; he was old, and old people
are often afflicted with doubts about the progress and
welfare of mankind ; he had a warm and tender heart,
an abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go
beyond these facts to explain his contempt for "the
Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its stock-in-trade,
"Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and
Hymn-Books, ' ' and ' ' Trade Gin and Torches of Progress
and Enlightenment." All his closest friends were accus-
tomed to little notes like this : " I have been reading the
morning paper. I do it every morning, well knowing
that I shall find in it the usual depravities and base-
nesses and hypocricies and cruelties that make up civil-
ization and cause me to put in the rest of the day
pleading for the damnation of the human race. ' ' Might
not any sensitive man, young or old, have written that?

Even now, with all the perspective of Mark Twain's
writings which only a succeeding generation can really
have, it might be possible to explain in this objective
way the steady progress toward a pessimistic cynicism

Mark Twain's Despair 7

which Mr. Paine, at least, has noted in his work. The
change in tone between the poetry of the first half of
"Life on the Mississippi" and the dull notation of the
latter half, between the exuberance of "A Tramp
Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Fol-
lowing the Equator," with those corroding aphorisms of
"Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," that constant
running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery,
along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get
even with the reader for taking his text at its face value
— all this might be attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it,
to the burdens of debt and family sorrow. If he was al-
ways manifesting, in word and deed, his deep belief that
life is inevitably a process of deterioration, — well, did
not James Whitcomb Riley do the same thing? Was it
not, is it not, a popular American dogma that ' ' the bad-
dest children are better than the goodest men"? A race
of people who feel this way could not have thought there
was anything amiss with a humorist who wrote maxims
like these:

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will
not bite you. This is the principal difference between "i dog and
a man.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt
you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get
the news to you.

They could hardly have been surprised at the bitter,
yes, even the vindictive, mockery of ' ' The Man That Cor-
rupted Hadleyburg," at Mark Twain's definition of man
as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted neither "to
supply the coffee nor turn the crank," at his recurring
' ' plan ' ' to exterminate the human race by withdrawing
the oxygen from the air for a period of two minutes.

Has not the American public, with its invincible habit
of "turning hell's back-yard into a playground," gone
so far even as to discount "The Mysterious Stranger,"

8 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole of cruel non-
sense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank
assertion that slavery, hypocrisy and cowardice are the
eternal destiny of man? Professor Stuart P. Sherman,
who likes to defend the views of thirty years ago and
sometimes seems to forget that all traditions are not of
equal validity, says of this book that it "lets one into
a temperament and character of more gravity, com-
plexity and interest than the surfaces indicated.' ' But
having made this discovery, for he is openly surprised,
Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and unex-
pected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had
known before: "What Mark Twain hated was the brutal
power resident in monarchies, aristocracies, tribal re-
ligions and — minorities bent on mischief, and making
a bludgeon of the malleable many. ' ' And, after all, he
says, "the wicked world visited by the mysterious
stranger is sixteenth century Austria — not these States. ' '
But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in reality Han-
nibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys
through whose eyes the story is told simply reincarna-
tions of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, those characters
which, as we know from a hundred evidences, haunted
Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any
rate, Mark Twain's boys, and whoever compares their
moral attitude with that of the boys of Mark Twain's
prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into his
soul. "We boys wanted to warn them" — Marget and
Ursula, against the danger that was gathering about
them — ' ' but we backed down when it came to the pinch,
being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough
nor brave enough to do a generous action when there
was a chance that it could get us into trouble." What,
is this Mark Twain speaking, the creator of Huck and
Tom, who gladly broke every law of the tribe to protect
and rescue Nigger Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly
enough nor brave enough" to do a generous action when

Mark Twain's Despair 9

there was a chance that it could get them into trouble?
Can we, in the light of this, continue to say that Mark
Twain's pessimism was due to anything so external as
the hatred of tyranny, and a sixteenth century Austrian
tyranny at that? Is it not perfectly plain that that
deep contempt for man, the " coffee-mill, ' * a contempt
that has spread now even to the boy-nature of which
Mark Twain had been the lifelong hierophant, must have
had some far more personal root, must have sprung
from some far more intimate chagrin? One goes back
to the long series of * ' Pudd 'nhead ' ' maxims, not the
bitter ones now, but those desperate notes that seem to
bear no relation to the life even of a sardonic humorist :

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" — a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to
live.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his
others — his last breath.

And that paragraph about the death of his daughter,
so utterly inconsistent with the temperament he ascribes
to himself: "My life is a bitterness, but I am content;
for she has been enriched with the most precious of all
gifts — the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor
— death. I have never wanted any released friend of
mine restored to life since I reached manhood. I felt
in this way when Susy passed away ; and later my wife,
and later Mr. Rogers." Two or three constructions,
to one who knows Mark Twain, might be put upon that :
but at least one of them is that, not to the writer's
apprehension, but in the writer's experience, life has
been in some special way a vain affliction.

Can we, then, accept any of the usual explanations of
Mark Twain's pessimism? Can we attribute it, with
Mr. Paine, to the burdens of debt under which he labored
now and again, to the recurring illnesses, the death of

io The Ordeal of Mark Twain

those he loved? No, for these things would have modi-
fied his temperament, not his point of view ; they would
have saddened him, checked his vitality, given birth
perhaps to a certain habit of brooding, and this they
did not do. We have, in addition to his own testimony,
the word of Mr. Paine: "More than any one I ever
knew, he lived in the present." Of the misfortunes of
life he had neither more nor less than other men, and
they affected him neither more nor less. To say any-
thing else would be to contradict the whole record of his
personality.

No, it was some deep malady of the soul that afflicted
Mark Twain, a malady common to many Americans, per-
haps, if we are to judge from that excessive interest in
therapeutics which he shared with so many millions of
his fellow-countrymen. That is an aspect of Mark
Twain's later history which has received too little atten-
tion. "Whether it was copyright legislation, the latest
invention, or a new empiric practice, ' ' says Mr. Paine —
to approach this subject on its broadest side — "he rarely
failed to have a burning interest in some anodyne that
would provide physical or mental easement for his
species/ ' And here again the general leads to the par-
ticular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender heart
for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer
sorts of scienticians. ' ' Mr. Howells tells how, on the
advice of some sage, he and all his family gave up their
spectacles for a time and came near losing their eye-
sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in
their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations.
There was that momentary rage for the art of "predi-
cating correlation' ' at Professor Loisette's School of
Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method
that possessed his mind during the year 1900 ; he wrote
long articles about it, bombarding his friends with let-
ters of appreciation and recommendation of the new
cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave most of

Mark Twain's Despair II

his thought to it." There was Plasmon, that "panacea
for all human ills which osteopathy could not reach."
There was Christian Science to which, in spite of his
attacks on Mrs. Eddy and the somewhat equivocal book
he wrote on the subject, he was, as Mr. Paine says, and
as he frequently averred himself, one of the "earliest
converts," who "never lost faith in its power." And
lastly, there was the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine"
which he himself put together piecemeal from all the
others, to the final riddance of materia medica.

We have seen what Mark Twain's apparent health
was. Can we say that this therapeutic obsession was due
to the illnesses of his family, which were, indeed, unend-
ing? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant
stimulus to the obsession — the ' ' eclectic therapeutic doc-
trine," for instance, did, quite definitely, rise up out
of the midst of them. But it is plain that there had to
be an element of "soul-cure" in these various healings
for Mark Twain to be interested! in them, that what
interested him in them was the ' ' soul-cure, ' ' the ' ' mind-
cure." Can he say too much in praise of Christian
Science for its "healing of the spirit," its gift of "buoy-
ant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from care"?
In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental
healing began at a time when he and his family alike
were free from illness. It is in 1886, when Mark Twain
was at the very summit of his fame, when he was the
most successful publisher in the world, when he was at
work on his most ambitious book, when he was "fright-
ened," as he said, at the proportions of his prosperity,
when his household was aglow with happiness and well-
being, that his daughter Susy notes in her diary: "Papa
has been very much interested of late in the ' mind-cure '
theory." It might be added that he was about at the
age when, according to his famous aphorism, a man who
does not become a pessimist knows too little about
life.

12 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

In fact, the more one scans the later pages of Mark
Twain's history the more one is forced to the conclusion
that there was something gravely amiss with his inner
life. There was that frequently noted fear of solitude,
that dread of being alone with himself which made him,
for example, beg for just one more game of billiards at
4 o'clock in the morning. There were those " daily self-
chidings" that led him to slay his own conscience in
one of the most ferocious of his humorous tales. That
conscience of his — what was it? "Why do so many of
his jokes turn upon an affectation, let us say, of moral
cowardice in himself? How does it happen that when
he reads "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him
"with force" is Tito's compromise with his conscience?
Why those continual fits of remorse, those fantastic self-
accusations in which he charged himself, we are told,
with having filled Mrs. Clemens 's life with privations,
in which he made himself responsible first for the death
of his younger brother and later for that of his daugh-
ter Susy, writing to his wife, according to Mr. Paine,
that he was "wholly and solely responsible for the
tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality his
mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-
fall, the separation from Susy, and this final, incredible
disaster"? Was there any reason why, humorously or
otherwise, he should have spoken of himself as a liar,
why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of
writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I
went on now and took him into manhood, he would just
lie, like all the one-horse men in literature, and the
reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him"?
That morbid feeling of having lived in sin, which made
him come to think of literature as primarily, perhaps,
the confession of sins — was there anything in the moral
point of view of his generation to justify it, in this
greatly-loved writer, this honorable man of business,
this zealous reformer, this loyal friend? "Be weak, be

Mark Twain's Despair 13

water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable ' ' was, he
said, the first command the Deity ever issued to a human
being on this planet, the only command Adam would
never be able to disobey. And he noted on the margin
of one of his books: "What a man sees in the human
race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of
his own heart. Byron despised the race because he
despised himself. I feel as Byron did and for the same
reason. ' '

A strange enigma ! ' ' You observe, ' ' wrote Mark Twain
once, almost at the beginning of his career, "that under
a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with
me and gives me freely its contempt." That spirit
remained with him, grew in him, to the last. The rest-
less movement of his life, those continual journeys to
Bermuda, where "the deep peace and quiet of the
country sink into one's body and bones and give his
conscience a rest," that consuming desire to write an
autobiography "as caustic, fiendish and devilish as pos-
sible," which would "make people's hair curl" and get
"his heirs and assigns burnt alive" if they ventured to
print it within a hundred years, the immense relief of
his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute
of limitations — you have served your term, well or less
well, and you are mustered out" — how are we to read
the signs of all this hidden tragedy? For Mark Twain
was right — things do not happen by chance, and the
psychological determinism of the present day bears out
in certain respects that other sort of determinism in
which he so almost fanatically believed. There is no
figure for the human being like the ship, he sometimes
said. Well, was he not, in the eyes of his contemporaries,
just as he proudly, gratefully suggested, in the glory of
that last English welcome, the Begum of Bengal, stateli-
est of Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud
of canvas? Can we call it merely an irony of circum-|
stance that in his own eyes he was a bit of storm-beaten

14 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

human drift, a derelict, washing about on a forlorn sea?

No, there was a reason for Mark Twain's pessimism,
a reason for that chagrin, that fear of solitude, that
tortured conscience, those fantastic self -accusations, that
indubitable self-contempt. It is an established fact,
if I am not mistaken, that these morbid feelings of sin,
which have no evident cause, are the result of having
transgressed some inalienable life-demand peculiar to
one 's nature. It is as old as Milton that there are talents
which are " death to hide," and I suggest that Mark
Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness
of his was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his crea-
tive life, a balked personality, an arrested development
of which he was himself almost wholly unaware, but
which for him destroyed the meaning of life. The spirit
of the artist in him, like the genie at last released from
the bottle, overspread in a gloomy vapor the mind it had
never quite been able to possess.

Does this seem too rash a hypothesis? It is, I know,
the general impression that Mark Twain quite fully
effectuated himself as a writer. Mr. Howells called him
the * ' Lincoln of our literature, ' ' Professor William Lyon
Phelps describes him as one of the supreme novelists of
the world, Professor Brander Matthews compares him
with Cervantes, and Bernard Shaw said to him once:
"I am persuaded that the future historian of America
will find your works as indispensable to him as a French
historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." These
were views current in Mark Twain's lifetime, and sim-
ilar views are common enough to-day. "Mark Twain,"
says Professor Archibald Henderson, "enjoys the unique
distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a
deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of intel-
lectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the
end." To Mr. John Macy, author of what is, on the
whole, the most discerning book that has been written on
our literature, he is " a powerful, original thinker. ' ' And

Mark Twain's Despair 15

finally, Mr. H. L. Mencken says : ' ' Mark Twain, without
question, was a great artist. There was in him some-
thing of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof
engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating
cynicism, which one associates with the great artists of
the Renaissance.' ' An imposing array of affirmations,
surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few
years, during which he has become in a way so much
more interesting, have witnessed a singular change in
Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly present he is in the
public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort of arch-
type of the national character during a long epoch. Will
he not continue so to be for many generations to come ?
Undoubtedly. By whom, however, with the exception
of two or three of his books, is he read? Mr. Paine, I
know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this
day in America in larger quantity than any other book
of travel. But a number of explanations might be given
for this, as for any other mob phenomenon, none of
which has anything to do with literary fame in the
proper sense. A great writer of the past is known by
the delight and stimulus which he gives to mature spirits
in the present, and time, it seems to me, tends to bear
out the assertion of Henry James that Mark Twain's
appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckle-
berry Finn, " ' ' Tom Sawyer, ' ' a story or two like ' ' The
Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, ' ' a sketch or two like
"Traveling with a Reformer" and a few chapters of
"Life on the Mississippi," — these, in any case, can
already be said to have "survived" all his other work.
And are these writings, however beautiful and impor-
tant, the final expressions of a supreme artistic genius,
one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cer-
vantes ? Arnold Bennett, I think, forecast the view that
prevails to-day when he called their author the "divine
amateur" and said of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom
Sawyer" that while they are "episodically magnificent,

16 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

as complete works of art they are of quite inferior
quality. ' '

So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished.
But if he had not been potentially a great man could
he have so impressed, so dazzled almost every one who
came into direct, personal contact with him ? When his
contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cer-
vantes, they were certainly mistaken; but would they
have made that mistake if they had not recognized in
him, if not a creative capacity, at least a creative force,
of the highest rank? Mark Twain's unbounded energy,
his prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that " great,
burly fancy' ' of his, as Mr. How ells calls it, his powers
of feeling, the unique magnetism of his personality
were the signs of an endowment, one cannot help think-
ing, more extraordinary than that of any other Ameri-
can writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those
major spirits, like Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or per-
haps like Pushkin, who are as if intended by nature to
preside over the genius of nations and give birth to
the leading impulses of entire epochs. ' ' I thought, ' ' said
one of his associates in earlier years, "that the noble
costume of the Albanian would have well become him.
Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the horned
bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the
prow of one of the swift craft of the vikings. ' ' And on
the other hand, hear what Mr. Howells says: "Among
the half-dozen, or half -hundred, personalities that each
of us becomes, I should say that Clemens 's central and
final personality was something exquisite. " That com-
bination of barbaric force and intense sweetness, which
so many others noted in him — is there not about it some-
thing portentous, something that suggests the true lord
of life ? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with
him the psychic atmosphere of a planet as it were all
his own. Gigantic, titanic were the words that came
to people's lips when they tried to convey their impres-

Mark Twain's Despair 17

sion of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment
as if one of the fixed stars had fallen in space.

This was the force, this the energy which, through
Mark Twain's pen, found such inadequate expression.
He was, as Arnold Bennett says, a "divine amateur";
his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called it,
an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply
another way of saying, in the latter case, that his was
a mind that had not developed, and in the former, that
his was a splendid genius which had never found itself?

It is the conclusion borne out by Mark Twain's own
self -estimate. His judgments were, as Mr. Paine says,
"always unsafe": strictly speaking, he never knew
what to think of himself, he was in two minds all the
time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to
warn us against his formal opinions. When, therefore,
one appeals for evidence to Mark Twain's estimate of
himself it is no conscious judgment of his career one has
in mind but a far more trustworthy judgment, the
judgment of his unconscious self. This he revealed
unawares in all sorts of ways.

There were times when he seemed to share the com-
placent confidence of so many others in his immortal
fame. "I told Howells," he writes, in his large, loose,
easy way, "that this autobiography of mine would live
a couple of thousand years, without any effort, and
would then take a fresh start and live the rest of the
time." And Mr. Paine says that as early as October,
1900, he had proposed to Messrs. Harper and Brothers
a contract for publishing his personal memoirs at the
expiration of one hundred years, letters covering the
details of which were exchanged with his financial ad-
viser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed
this must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure
of posterity, pretty confident of his own greatness. But
it was only at moments. Mark Twain was a megalo-
maniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as

18 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

he did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does
that sort of megalomania express a genuine self-confi-
dence? Does it not suggest rather a profound, uneasy
desire for corroboration ? Of this the famous episode of
his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. " Al-
though I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of
the ship that carried me, I am glad to do it," he wrote,
"for an Oxford degree." Many American writers have
won that honor ; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident
in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain
it became a historic event : it was for him, plainly, of an
exceptional significance, and all his love for gorgeous
trappings could never account for the delight he had in
that doctor's gown — "I would dress that way all the
time, if I dared," he told Mr. Paine — which became for
him a permanent robe of ceremony. And Mark Twain
at seventy-two, one of the most celebrated men in the
world, could not have cared so much for it if it had
been a vindication merely in the eyes of others. It must
have served in some way also to vindicate him in his
own eyes; he seized upon it as a sort of talisman, as a
reassurance from what he considered the highest court
of culture, that he really was one of the elect.

Yes, that naive passion for the limelight, for "walk-
ing with kings" and hobnobbing with job lots of celeb-
rities, that "revelling," as Mr. Paine calls it, "in the
universal tribute ' ' — what was its root if not a deep sense
of insecurity, a desire for approval both in his own eyes
and in the eyes of all the world? During those later
years in New York, when he had become so much the
professional celebrity, he always timed his Sunday morn-
ing walks on Fifth Avenue for about the hour when the
churches were out. Mr. Paine tells how, on the first
Sunday morning, he thoughtlessly suggested that they
should turn away at Fifty-ninth Street in order to avoid
the throng and that Clemens quietly remarked, "I like
the throng." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the

Mark Twain's Despair 19

Plaza Hotel until the appointed hour. . . . We left the
Plaza Hotel and presently were amid the throng of
outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object
on which every passing eye turned, the presence to
which every hat was lifted. I realized that this open
and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still
dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the
tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for
approval and corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have
been very deep in a quick-tempered, satirical democrat
like Mark Twain, when he permitted his associates to
call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"?
Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obses-
sion: kings, empresses, princes, archduchesses — what a
part they play in his biography! He is always drag-
ging them in, into his stories, into his letters, writing
about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them,
and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals
they have. And as with kings, so also with great men,
or men who were considered great, or men who were
merely notorious. He makes lists of those he has known,
those he has spent evenings with — Mark Twain, to whom
celebrity was the cheapest thing going ! Is there not in
all this the suggestion of an almost conscious weakness
clutching at strength, the suggestion of some kind of
failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of
success ?

Turn from the man to the writer; we see again this
same desire for approval, for corroboration. Mark
Twain was supported by the sentiment of the majority,
which was gospel to the old-fashioned Westerner; he
had the golden opinion of Mr. Howells, in his eyes the
arbiter of all the elegances ; he had virtually the freedom
of The Atlantic Monthly, and not only its freedom but
a higher rate of payment than any other Atlantic con-
tributor. Could any American man of letters have had
more reason to think well of himself? Observe what

20 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

he thought. "I haven't as good an opinion of my work
as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells in 1887,
"but I've always done what I could to secure and
enlarge my good opinion of it. I've always said to
myself, 'Everybody reads it and that's something — it
surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable people
would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said
by implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the
remark, 'High and fine literature is wine,' I retorted
(confidentially to myself), 'Yes, high and fine literature
is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes
water.' " That is frank enough; he is not always so.
There is a note of unconscious guile, the guile of the
peasant, of the sophisticated small boy, in the letter he
wrote to Andrew Lang, beseeching a fair hearing in
England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He rails
against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses
as an uplif ter of the masses ; then, with a touch of mock-
noble indignation, he confesses to being a popular enter-
tainer, fully convinced at least that there are two kinds
of literature and that an author ought to be allowed to
put upon his book an explanatory line : ' ' This is written
for the Head," or "This is written for the Belly or the
Members." No plea more grotesque or more pathetic
was ever written by a man with a great reputation to
support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely
ignorant of literary values: had he not wished upon
literature, as it were, a separation between the "Head"
and the "Belly" which, as we shall see, had simply
taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he
begs for the word of salvation from one who he thinks
can bestow it.

Mark Twain, in short, knew very well — for I think
these illustrations prove it — that there was something
decidedly different between himself and a great writer.
In that undifferentiated mob of celebrities, great, and
l§m great, and far from great, amid which he moved for

Mark Twain's Despair 21

a generation, he was a favored equal. But in the inti-
mate presence of some isolated greatness he reverted to
the primitive reverence of the candidate for the mysta-
gogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow
writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude.
Was it Browning? He forgot the man he had so
cordially known in the poet whom he studied for a time
with the naive self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it
Mommsen ? Read this humorous entry in one of his Ber-
lin note-books: "Been taken for Mommsen twice. We
have the same hair, but on examination it was found
the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses
the word " literature " in connection with his own work
it is with a sudden self -consciousness that lets one into
the secret of his inner humility. "I am the only literary
animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been
given a degree by any college in any age of the world,
so far as I know," he writes to the authorities of Yale
in 1888. A man who freely compared himself with the
melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, who, in the
preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins," invited his
readers, who already knew how "the born and trained
novelist works," to see how the "jack-leg" does it, could
never have been accused of not knowing his true rank.
"You and I are but sewing-machines," he says in
"What Is Man?" "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 Gobe-
lins."

I think we are in a position now to understand that
boundless comic impudence of Mark Twain's, that comic
impudence which led him to propose to Edwin Booth
in 1873 a new character for "Hamlet," which led him
to telegraph to W. T. Stead: "The Czar is ready to
disarm. I am ready to disarm. Collect the others; it
should not be much of a task now ' ' ; which led him, at
the outset of his career, to propose the conundrum,

22 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

"Why am I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it
thus: "I don't know. I was just asking for informa-
tion." Tempting Providence, was he not, this child of
good fortune? Literally, yes; he was trying out the
fates. If he had not had a certain sense of colossal
force, it would never have occurred to him, however
humorously, to place himself on an equality with
Shakespeare, to compare his power with that of the
Czar and his magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean.
But, on the other hand, it would never have occurred
to him to make these comparisons if he had felt himself
in possession, in control, of that force. Men who are
not only great in energy but masters of themselves let
their work speak for them ; men who are not masters of
themselves, whose energy, however great, is not, so to
speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are driven,
as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek cor-
roboration from without; for his inner self, at these
moments, wished to be assured that he really was great
and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare and the
Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inher-
ited great fortunes which they own but cannot com-
mand ; the power is theirs and yet they are not in control
of it ; consequently, in order to reassure themselves, they
are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, there-
fore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark
Twain actually was interrogating destiny, feeling out
his public, in other words, which had in its hands the
disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy that
he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed
to him simply of an indeterminable, untestable, and
above all uncontrollable abundance. Did he not, in this
childlike self-magnification, combined with an instinc-
tive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the
barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these,
in the depth of that essential self-ignorance, that lack
of inner control that makes one's sole criterion the

Mark Twain's Despair 23

magnitude of one's grasp over the outer world, ever
more fully felt himself the man of destiny. All his life
Mark Twain was attended by what Mr. Paine calls
* ' psychic evidences ' ' ; he never fails to note the marvel-
ous coincidences of which he is the subject ; he is always
being struck by some manifestation of '* mental teleg-
raphy ' < — he invented the phrase ; strange phenomena of
nature rise up in his path. Three times, while crossing
the ocean, he sees a lunar rainbow, and each time he
takes it as a presage of good fortune. Not one of the
barbarian conquerors of antiquity, I say, those essential
opposites of the creative spirit, whose control is alto-
gether internal, and who feels himself the master of his
own fate, could have been more in character than was
Mark Twain when he observed, a few months before his
death: "I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is
coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.
It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I
don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has
said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable
freaks, they came in together, they must go out to-
gether.' Oh! I am looking forward to that."

A comet, this time ! And a few pages back we found
him comparing himself with a sewing-machine. "Which
is he, one, or the other, or both? He seems to exhibit
himself, on the one hand, as a child of nature conscious
of extraordinary powers that make all the world and
even the Almighty solicitous about him, and on the
other, as a humble, a humiliated man, confessedly
second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents com-
mitted to him and almost begs permission to keep the
one that remains. A great genius, in short, that has
never attained the inner control which makes genius
great, a mind that has not found itself, a mind that does
not know itself, a spirit that cloaks to the end in the
fantasy of its temporal power the tragic reality of its
own essential miscarriage!

24 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret
of Mark Twain 's mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy
of that little book which he called his " Bible," "What
Is Man?" He was extremely proud of the structure
of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a
machine, "moved, directed, commanded by exterior in-
fluences, solely/' that he is "a chameleon, who takes the
color of his place of resort," that he is "a mere coffee-
mill," which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee
nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of pro-
prietary interest and pleasure in the validity of that
notion. "Having found the Truth," he says, "preceiv-
ing that beyond question man has but one moving im-
pulse— the contenting of his own spirit — and is merely
a machine and entitled to no personal merit for what
he does, it is not humanly possible for me to seek further.
The rest of my days will be spent in patching and paint-
ing and puttying and calking my priceless possession
and in looking the other way when an imploring argu-
ment or a damaging fact approaches." You see how
it pleases him, how much it means to him, that final
"Truth," how he clings to it with a sort of defiant
insolence against the "imploring argument," the "dam-
aging fact"? "Man originates nothing," he says, "not
even a thought. . . . Shakespeare could not create. He
was a machine, and machines do not create." Faith
never gave the believer more comfort than this phil-
osophy gave Mark Twain.

But is it possible for a creative mind to find "con-
tentment" in denying the possibility of creation? And
why should any one find pride and satisfaction in the
belief that man is wholly irresponsible, in the denial of
"free will"? One remembers the fable of the fox and
the sour grapes, one remembers all those forlorn and
tragic souls who find comfort in saying that love exists
nowhere in the world because they themselves have
missed it. Certainly it could not have afforded Mark

Mark Twain's Despair 25

Twain any pleasure to feel that he was " entitled to
no personal merit " for what he had done, for what he
had achieved in life; the pleasure he felt sprang from
the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of feeling
that he was not responsible for what he had failed to
achieve — namely, his proper development as an artist.
He says aloud, ' ' Shakespeare could not create, ' ' and his
inner self adds, "How in the world, then, could I have
done so?" He denies "free will" because the creative
life is the very embodiment of it — the emergence, that
is to say, the activity in a man of one central, dominant,
integrating principle that turns the world he confronts
into a mere instrument for the registration of his own
preferences. There is but one interpretation, conse-
quently, which we can put upon Mark Twain's delight
in the conception of man as an irresponsible machine:
it brought him comfort to feel that if he was, as he said,
a "sewing-machine," it was the doing of destiny, and
that nothing he could have done himself would have
enabled him to "turn out Gobelins."

From his philosophy alone, therefore, we can see that
Mark Twain was a frustrated spirit, a victim of arrested
development, and beyond this fact, as we know from
innumerable instances the psychologists have placed
before us, we need not look for an explanation of the
chagrin of his old age. He had been balked, he had
been divided, he had even been turned, as we shall see,
against himself ; the poet, the artist in him, consequently,
had withered into the cynic and the whole man had
become a spiritual valetudinarian.

But this is a long story: to trace it we shall have to
glance not only at Mark Twain's life and work, but also
at the epoch and the society in which he lived.

CHAPTER II

THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE

"One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is dried
up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, but they
are essentially not happy.' '

Stendhal: On Love in the United States.

IN 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many-
years in the East, revisited the great river of his
childhood and youth in order to gather material for his
book, "Life on the Mississippi. ' ' It was, naturally, a
profound and touching experience, and years later he
told Mr. Paine what his thoughts and memories had
been. He had intended to travel under an assumed
name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but
the pilot of the steamer Gold Dust recognized him.
Mark Twain haunted the pilot-house and even, as in
days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We got to
be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most
of my time up there with him. When we got down be-
low Cairo, and there was a big, full river — for it was
high-water season and there was no danger of the boat
hitting anything so long as she kept in the river — I had
her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down
and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years
had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no
mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a
pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years
before. ' '

Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant,
that Mark Twain recorded in these words, a regret for

26

The Candidate for Life 27

the passing of time and the charm and the hope of
youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his
"literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not alto-
gether flattering to the self-respect of a veteran man of
letters ! And besides, we say to ourselves, if that earlier
vocation of his had been merely "happy and care-free"
a man of Mark Twain 's energy and power could hardly,
in later life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he cer-
tainly did : all his days he looked back upon those four
years on the Mississippi as upon a lost paradise. "I'd
rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done in
my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am
a person, ' ' he wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, ' ' who would
quit authorizing in a minute to go to piloting, if the
Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we see;
and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively
satisfying, that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and
beautiful is proved not only by the tender tone in which
he habitually spoke of it but by the fact that the earlier
pages of ' ' Life on the Mississippi, ' ' in which he pictures
it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and
expressive that he ever wrote.

It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong
hankering for the lost paradise of the pilot-house. It
was something more organic, and Mark Twain provides
us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my
subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his
book, "it is no surprising thing, for I loved the profes-
sion far better than any I have followed since, and I
took a measureless pride in it." A singular statement
for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life,
the two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are noth-
ing else than love and pride! But Mark Twain writes
those words with an almost unctuous gravity of convic-
tion, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a
pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative
life as he had not experienced it in literature. Strange

28 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

as that may seem, we cannot question it; we have, sim-
ply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi pilot had,
in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist
in him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in
him had never been satisfied again. "We do not have
to look beyond this in order to interpret, if not the fact,
at least the obsession. He felt that, in some way, he
had been as a pilot on the right track ; and he felt that
he had lost this track. If he was always harking back
to that moment, then, it was, we can hardly escape
feeling, with a vague hope of finding again some scent
that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious
thread of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it
possible that he had, in fact, found himself in his career
as a pilot and lost himself with that career? It is a
bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark
Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to
see first what sort of boy he was, and what sort of society
it was he grew up in ; then we shall be able to under-
stand what unique opportunities for personal growth
the career of a pilot afforded him.

What a social setting it was, that little world into
which Mark Twain was born ! It was drab, it was tragic.
In "Huckleberry Finn'' and "Tom Sawyer" we see
it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a
later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled
in Hannibal, on the Mississippi. He was five at the
time; his eyes had opened on such a scene as we find
in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary,
discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid
which, as he says, a man can do nothing but rot away,
that kind, worn, wan, desperately optimistic, fanatically
energetic mother, those ragged, wretched little children,
sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in some
gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan" — it is the epic
not only of Mark Twain's infancy but of a whole phase

The Candidate for Life 29

of American civilization. How many books have been
published of late years letting us behind the scenes of
the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E. H.
Howe's "Story of a Country Town,'' for instance,
that Western counterpart in sodden misery of "Ethan
Frome" — a book which has only begun to find its public.
This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest,
tells us in so many words that in all his early days he
never saw a woman who was not anaemic and fretful,
a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who
was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment.
No wonder he has come to believe, as he tells us frankly
in a later book, that there is no such thing as love in
the world ! Think of those villages Mark Twain himself
has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks,
dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of
rusty cans and foul rags, how like the leavings of some
vast over-turned scrap-basket, some gigantic garbage-
can ! Human nature was not responsible for this debris
of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could
human nature rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and
murder," we are told, were the diversions of the capital
city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. It was not
very different in normal times along the Mississippi.
Hannibal was a small place ; yet Mr. Paine records four
separate murders which Mark Twain actually witnessed
as a boy : every week he would see some drunken ruffian
run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, he
saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many
gruesome experiences/ ' exclaims Mr. Paine, "there
appear to have been in those early days ! ' ' But let us be
moderate : every one was not violent. As for the major-
ity of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that
history calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion,
justice will never be realistic. The gods of Greece would
have gone unwashed and turned gray at forty and lost

30 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

their digestion and neglected their children if they had
been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into
an irritable silence.

A desert of human sand! — the barrenest spot in all
Christendom, surely, for the seed of genius to fall in.
John Hay, revisiting these regions after having lived for
several years in New England, wrote in one of his let-
ters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.
... I find only a dreary waste of heartless materialism,
where great and heroic qualities may indeed bully their
way up into the glare, but the flowers of existence inevit-
ably droop and wither. ' '

Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless house-
hold: the choice of his mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells
us, had been "a young physician of Lexington with
whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement
with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than
tenderness." Mark Twain "did not remember ever
having seen or heard his father laugh," we are told, and
only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying,
had he seen one member of his family kiss another. His
father, absorbed in a perpetual motion machine, "seldom
devoted any time to the company of his children." No
wonder, poor man ; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon
him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a
nerve-racking "sun-pain" that would have checked the
humane impulses of an archangel. Even his mother, the
backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent
medicines, ' ' pain-killers, ' ' health periodicals — we have it
from "Tom Sawyer" — "she was an inveterate experi-
menter in these things." They were all, we see, living
on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, desiccated
existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough
oil, without enough power, grating on their own metal.

Little Sam, as every one called him, was the fifth child
in this household, "a puny baby with a wavering prom-
ise of life " ; it is suggested that he was not wanted. Mr.

The Candidate for Life 31

Paine speaks of him somewhere as "high-strung and
neurotic. ' ' We are not surprised, therefore, to find him
at three and four "a wild-headed, impetuous child of
sudden ecstasies that sent him capering and swinging his
arms, venting his emotions in a series of leaps and shrieks
and somersaults, and spasms of laughter as he lay rolling
in the grass. ' ' This is the child who is to retain through
life that exquisite sensibility of which so many observers
have spoken. "Once when I met him in the country,' '
says Mr. Howells, for example, of his later life, "he had
just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing
down a blackbird; and he described the poor, stricken,
glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the
grass, with such pity as he might have given a wounded
child." Already, in his infancy, his gentle, winning
manner and smile make him every one's favorite. A
very special little flower of life, you see, capable of such
feeling that at twenty-three his hair is to turn gray in
the tragic experience of his brother 's death. A flower of
life, a wild flower, and infinitely fragile: the doctor is
always being called in his behalf. Before he grows up
he is to have prophetic dreams, but now another neurotic
symptom manifests itself. In times of family crisis, at
four, when one of his sisters is dying, at twelve, after
the death of his father, he walks in his sleep : often the
rest of the household get up in the middle of the night
to find this delicate little waif with his eyes shut "fret-
ting with cold in some dark corner."

Can we not already see in this child the born, pre-
destined artist? And what sort of nurture will his
imagination have? He is abandoned to the fervid
influences of the negro slaves, — for his father had mo-
ments of a relative prosperity. Crouching in their
cabins, he drinks in wild, weird tales of blood-curdling
African witchcraft. "Certainly," says Mr. Paine, "an
atmosphere like this meant a tropic development for
the imagination of a delicate child." One thinks in-

32 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

deed of an image that would have pleased Heine, the
image of a frail snow-plant of the North quivering,
flaming in the furnace of the jungle. Mark Twain
appears to have been from the outset a center of in-
terest, radiating a singular potency; and the more his
spirit was subjected to such a fearful stimulus the
more urgently he required for his normal develop-
ment the calm, clairvoyant guidance a pioneer child
could never have had. The negroes were "in real
charge of the children and supplied them with entertain-
ment.,, What other influence was there to counter-
balance this?

One, and one only, an influence tragic in its ultimate
consequences, the influence of Mark Twain's mother.
That poor, taciturn, sunstruck failure, John Clemens,
was a mere pathetic shadow beside the woman whose
portrait Mark Twain has drawn for us in the Aunt
Polly of "Tom Sawyer." She who was regarded as a
"character" by all the town, who was said to have been
"the handsomest girl and the wittiest, as well as the
bast dancer, in all Kentucky," who was still able to
dance at 80, and lived to be 87, who belonged, in short,
to ' ' the long-lived, energetic side of the house, ' ' directed
her children, we are told — and we can believe it — "with
considerable firmness." And what was the inevitable
relationship between her and this little boy? "She had
a weakness," says Mr. Paine, "for the child that de-
manded most of her mother's care . . . All were tracta-
ble and growing in grace but little Sam ... a delicate
little lad to be worried over, mothered, or spanked and
put to bed." In later life, "you gave me more uneasi-
ness than any child I had," she told him. In fact, she
was always scolding him, comforting him, forgiving him,
punishing and pleading with him, fixing her attention
upon him, exercising her emotions about him, impressing
it upon his mind for all time, as we shall come to see.

The Candidate for Life 33

that woman is the inevitable seat of authority and the
fount of wisdom.

We know that such excessive influences are apt to
deflect the growth of any spirit. Men are like planets
in this, that for them to sail clear in their own orbits
the forces of gravity have to be disposed with a certain
balance on all sides: how often, when the father counts
for nothing, a child becomes the satellite of its mother,
especially when that mother's love has not found its
normal expression in her own youth! We have seen
that Mark Twain's mother did not love her husband;
that her capacity for love, however, was very great is
proved by the singular story revealed in one of Mark
Twain's letters: more than sixty years after she had
quarreled with that young Lexington doctor, and when
her husband had long been dead, she, a woman of eighty
or more, took a railway journey to a distant city where
there was an Old Settlers' convention because among the
names of those who were to attend it she had noticed the
name of the lover of her youth. "Who could have
imagined such a heart-break as that ? ' ' said Mr. Howells,
when he heard the story. "Yet it went along with the
fulfillment of every-day duty and made no more noise
than a grave under foot." It made no noise, but it
undoubtedly had a prodigious effect upon Mark Twain's
life. When an affection as intense as that is balked
in its direct path and repressed it usually, as we know,
finds an indirect outlet ; and it is plain that the woman
as well as the mother expressed itself in the passionate
attachment of Jane Clemens to her son. We shall note
many consequences of this fact as we go on with our
story. We can say at least at this point that Mark
Twain was, quite definitely, in his mother's leading-
strings.

What was the inevitable result? I have said, not, I
hope, with too much presumption, that Mark Twain had

34 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

already shown himself the born, predestined artist, that
his whole nature manifested what is called a tendency
toward the creative life. For that tendency to become
conscious, to become purposive, two things were neces-
sary: it must be able, in the first place, to assert itself
and in the second place to embody itself in a vocation;
to realize itself and then to educate itself, to realize
itself in educating itself. And, as we know, the influ-
ences of early childhood are, in these matters, vitally
important. If Jane Clemens had been a woman of wide
experience and independent mind, in proportion to the
strength of her character, Mark Twain's career might
have been wholly different. Had she been catholic in
her sympathies, in her understanding of life, then, no
matter how more than maternal her attachment to her
son was, she might have placed before him and encour-
aged him to pursue interests and activities amid which
he could eventually have recovered his balance, reduced
the filial bond to its normal measure and stood on his
own feet. But that is to wish for a type of woman our
old pioneer society could never have produced. We are
told that the Aunt Polly of "Tom Sawyer" is a speak-
ing portrait of Jane Clemens, and Aunt Polly, as we
know, was the symbol of all the taboos. The stronger
her will was, the more comprehensive were her repres-
sions, the more certainly she became the inflexible
guardian of tradition in a social regime where tradition
was inalterably opposed to every sort of personal devia-
tion from the accepted type. * ' In their remoteness from
the political centers of the young Republic," says Mr.
Howells, in "The Leatherwood God," of these old Mid-
dle Western settlements, * ' they seldom spoke of the civic
questions stirring the towns of the East ; the commercial
and industrial problems which vex modern society were
unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest."
And in the slave States it was not the abolitionist alone
whose name was held, as Mr. Paine says, "in horror,"

The Candidate for Life 35

but every one who had the audacity to think differently
from his neighbors. Jane Clemens, in short, was the
embodiment of that old-fashioned, cast-iron Calvinism
which had proved so favorable to the life of enterprising
action but which perceived the scent of the devil in any
least expression of what is now known as the creative
impulse. She had a kind heart, she was always repent-
ing and softening and forgiving; it is said that when-
ever she had to drown kittens, she warmed the water
first. But this, without opening any channel in a con-
trary direction, only sealed her authority ! She won her
points as much by kindness as by law. Besides, tradition
spoke first in her mind ; her hand was quicker than her
heart; in action she was the madonna of the hairbrush.
And what, specifically, was it that she punished ? Those
furtive dealings of Huck and Tom with whitewash and
piracy were nothing in the world — and that is why all
the world loves them — but the first stirrings of the nor-
mal aesthetic sense, the first stirrings of individuality.

Already I think we divine what was bound to happen
in the soul of Mark Twain. The story of " Huckleberry
Finn" turns, as we remember, upon a conflict: "the
author,' ' says Mr. Paine, "makes Huck's struggle a
psychological one between conscience and the law, on
one side, and sympathy on the other." In the famous
episode of Nigger Jim, "sympathy," the cause of indi-
vidual freedom, wins. Years later, in "The Mysterious
Stranger, ' ' Mark Twain presented the parallel situation
we noted in the last chapter : " we found, ' ' says the boy
who tells that story, "that we were not manly enough
nor brave enough to do a generous action when there
was a chance that it could get us into trouble." Con-
science and the law, we see, had long since prevailed in
the spirit of Mark Twain, but what is the conscience
of a boy who checks a humane impulse but "boy terror,"
as Mr. Paine calls it, an instinctive fear of custom, of
tribal authority? The conflict in "Huckleberry Finn"

36 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

is simply the conflict of Mark Twain's own childhood.
He solved it successfully, he fulfilled his desire, in the
book, as an author can. In actual life he did not solve
it at all; he surrendered.

Turn to the record in Mr. Paine 's biography. "We
find Mark Twain in perpetual revolt against all those
institutions for which his mother stood. "Church ain't
worth shucks," says Tom Sawyer. As for school, "he
never learned to like it. Each morning he went with
reluctance and remained with loathing — the loathing
which he always had for anything resembling bondage
and tyranny or even the smallest curtailment of lib-
erty/' One recalls what Huck said of Aunt Polly just
before he made his escape to the woods:

1 * Don 't talk about it, Tom. I 've tried it and it don 't work ; it
don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The
widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them ways.
She makes me git up just at the same time every morning; she
makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me
sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that
just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to any air get through
'em somehow, and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down,
nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a
cellar-door for — well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church
and sweat and sweat — I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch
a fly in there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The
widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by
a bell — everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it."

But Mark Twain did not escape to the woods, literally
or in any other way. He never even imagined that his
feelings of revolt had any justification. We' remember
how, when Huck and Tom were caught in some escapade,
they would resolve to "lead a better life," to go to
church, visit the sick, carry them baskets of food and
subsist wholly upon tracts. That was what Mark Twain
did: "not to do so," says Mr. Paine, "was dangerous.
Flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were
heedless of sacred matters; his home teaching convinced

The Candidate for Life 37

him of that." And his mother was so strong, so cour-
ageous, the only strong and courageous influence he
knew. "In some vague way," says Mr. Paine, "he set
them down" — the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves,
caught and beaten and sold — "as warnings, or punish-
ments, designed to give him a taste for a better life."
Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence himself,
not to play with freedom ! "He felt that it was his own
conscience that made these things torture him. That
was his mother 's idea, and he had a high respect for her
moral opinions." Naturally! And she "punished him
and pleaded with him, alternately ' ' — with one inevitable
result. " ' To fear God and dread the Sunday School, ' ' '
he wrote to Mr. Howells in later years, "exactly de-
scribed that old feeling which I used to have"; and he
tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a preacher,
"because it never occurred to me that a preacher could
be damned. ' ' Can we not see that already the boy whose
interests and preferences and activities diverge from
those of the accepted type had become in his eyes the
"bad" boy, that individuality itself, not to mention the
creative life, had become for him identical with "sin"?
Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt,
has grown up and flourished like a blade of grass be-
tween the cobblestones of Calvinism. Scotland has a
tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other tradi-
tions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities — how can
we compare the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe
with that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle West of
ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell of his
infancy and find a vocation there ? Calvinism itself had
gone to seed : it was nothing but the dead hand of cus-
tom; the flaming priest had long since given way to
the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he could
find nowhere, either in men or inl)ooks, the bread and
wine of the spirit. In all his youth, unless we except
that journeyman chair-maker, Frank Burrough, who

38 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is record
of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a
Scotchman named Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincin-
nati. ' ' They were long fermenting discourses, ' ' Mr.
Paine tells us, "that young Samuel Clemens listened to
that winter in Macfarlane 's room. ' ' And what was the
counsel which, from that sole source, his blind and
wavering aptitude received ? — that * ' man 's heart was the
only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the
only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunken-
ness" and that his intellect was only a "depraving
addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank
far below the other beasts." Propitious words for this
candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so
it was with books. In "Life on the Mississippi" there
is a memorable picture of the library in the typical
gentleman's house all the way from St. Louis to New
Orleans: Martin Tupper, "Friendship's Offering,"
"Affection's Wreath," Ossian, "Alonzo and Melissa,"
"Ivanhoe," and "Godey's Lady's Book," "piled and
disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an inher-
ited and unchangeable plan." How, indeed, could the
cultural background of that society have been anything
but stagnant when no fresh stream of cultural interest
could possibly penetrate through the foreground? One
day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark
Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of
Joan of Arc, which was flying in the wind. That seed,
so planted, was to blossom half a century later: even
now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. "It
gave him his cue, ' ' says Mr. Paine, l ' the first word of a
part in the human drama," and he conceived a sudden
interest in history and languages. Anything might
have come of that impulse if it had had the least pro-
tection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a
matter of fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a
joke.

The Candidate for Life 39

In all his environment, then, we see, there was noth-
ing to assist in the transformation of an unconscious
artistic instinct, however urgent, into a conscious art-
istic purpose. "Dahomey," wrote Mark Twain once,
"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." He was recit-
ing his own story in those words. But the circumstances
that surrounded Mark Twain were not merely passively
unfavorable to his own self-discovery; they were
actively, overwhelmingly unfavorable. He was in his
mother's leading-strings, and in his mother's eyes any
sort of personal self-assertion in choices, preferences,
impulses was, literally, sinful. Thus the whole weight
of the Calvinistic tradition was concentrated against
him at his most vulnerable point. His mother, whom he
could not gainsay, was unconsciously but inflexibly set
against his genius; and destiny, which always fights on
the side of the heaviest artillery, delivered, in his twelfth
year, a stroke that sealed her victory.

Mark Twain's father died. Let Mr. Paine picture
the scene:

"The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse,
which always dealt with him unsparingly, laid a heavy
hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, indifference
to his father's wishes, all were remembered; a hundred
things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart-
wringing in the knowledge that they could never be
undone. Seeing his grief, his mother took him by the
hand and led him into the room where his father lay. ' It
is all right, Sammy,' she said. ' What's done is done,
and it does not matter to him any more; but here by

the side of him now I want you to promise me .'

He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung him-
self into her arms. * I will promise anything, ' he sobbed,

40 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

'if you won't make me go to school! Anything!' His
mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said :
1 No, Sammy, yon need not go to school any more. Only
promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break
my heart.' So he promised her to be a faithful and
industrious man, and upright, like his father. His
mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and
justice was already strong within him. To him a prom-
ise was a serious matter at any time; made under con-
ditions like these it would be held sacred. That night
— it was after the funeral — his tendency to somnambul-
ism manifested itself. His mother and sister, who were
sleeping together, saw the door open and a form in white
enter. Naturally nervous at such a time, and living in
a day of almost universal superstition, they were terri-
fied and covered their heads. Presently a hand was laid
on the coverlet, first at the foot, then at the head of
the bed. A thought struck Mrs. Clemens: 'Sam!' she
said. He answered, but he was sound asleep and fell
to the floor. He had risen and thrown a sheet around
him in his dreams. He walked in his sleep several
nights in succession after that. Then he slept more
soundly."

Who is sufficiently the master of signs and portents
to read this terrible episode aright ? One thing, however,
we feel with irresistible certitude, that Mark Twain's
fate was once for all decided there. That hour by his
father's corpse, that solemn oath, that walking in his
sleep — we must hazard some interpretation of it all, and
I think we are justified in hazarding as most likely that
which explains the most numerous and the most signifi-
cant phenomena of his later life.

To a hypersensitive child such as Mark Twain was at
eleven that ceremonious confrontation with his father's
corpse must, in the first place, have brought a profound
nervous shock. Already, we are told, he was "broken
down" by his father's death; remorse had "laid a heavy

The Candidate for Life 41

hand on him." But what was this remorse; what had
he done for grief or shame? "A hundred things in
themselves trifling," which had offended, in reality, not
his father's heart but his father's will as a conven-
tional citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family
in his own likeness. Feeble, frantic, furtive little feel-
ings-out of this moody child, the first wavering steps of
the soul, that is what they have really been, these
peccadillos, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable
promptings of love tell him that they are sin! He is
broken down indeed; all those crystalline fragments of
individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, are suddenly
shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat
of that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his
mother stamps there, with awful ceremony, the com-
posite image of her own meager traditions. He is to
go forth the Good Boy by force majeure, he is to become
such a man as his father would have approved of, he is
to retrieve his father 's failure, to recover the lost gentil-
ity of a family that had once been proud, to realize that
"mirage of wealth" that had ever hung before his
father's eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heed-
lessly with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly
within the code, to remember the maxims of Ben
Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and all the con-
ventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into
any fanciful orbit of his own! . . . Hide your faces,
Huck and Tom! Put away childish things, Sam
Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always a
child, your mother's child! In a day to come you will
write to one of your friends, "We have no real morals,
but only artificial ones — morals created and preserved
by the forced suppression of natural and healthy in-
stincts." Never mind that now; your mother imagines
her heart is in the balance — will you break it? . . .
Will you promise ? . . . And the little boy, in the terror
of that presence, sobs: "Anything!"

42 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

" There is in every man/' said Sainte-Beuve, "a poet
who dies young." In truth, the poet does not die; he
falls into a fitful trance. It is perfectly evident what
happened to Mark Twain at this moment: he became,
and his immediate manifestation of somnambulism is
the proof of it, a dual personality. If I were sufficiently
hardy, as I am not, I should say that that little sleep-
walker who appeared at Jane Clemens 's bedside on the
night of her husband's funeral was the spirit of Tom
Sawyer, come to demand again the possession of his own
soul, to revoke that ruthless promise he had given. He
came for several nights, and then, we are told, the little
boy slept more soundly, a sign, one might say, if one
were a fortune-teller, that he had grown accustomed to
the new and difficult role of being two people at once!
The subject of dual personality was always, as we shall
see, an obsession with Mark Twain; he who seemed to
his friends such a natural-born actor, who was, in child-
hood, susceptible not only to somnambulism but to mes-
meric control, had shown from the outset a distinct
tendency toward what is called dissociation of conscious-
ness. His "wish" to be an artist, which has been so
frowned upon and has encountered such an insurmount-
able obstacle in the disapproval of his mother, is now
repressed, more or less definitely, and another wish, that
of winning approval, which inclines him to conform
with public opinion, has supplanted it. The individual,
in short, has given way to the type. The struggle
between these two selves, these two tendencies, these
two wishes or groups of wishes, will continue through-
out Mark Twain's life, and the poet, the artist, the
individual, will make a brave effort to survive. From
the death of his father onward, however, his will is
definitely enlisted on the side opposed to his essential
instinct.

When, a few years later, Mark Twain leaves home on
his first excursion into the great world, he gladly takes

The Candidate for Life 43

the oath, which his mother administers, "not to throw
a card or drink a drop of liquor" while he is away, an
oath she seals with a kiss. To obey Jane Clemens, to do
what seems good in her eyes, not to try life and make
his own rejections, has become actually pleasing to him;
it is his own will to make the journey of life "in bond,"
as surely as any box that was ever sent by freight.
Never was an adolescence more utterly objective than
Mr. Paine 's record shows Mark Twain's to have been!
For several years before he was twenty-one he drifted
about as a journeyman printer : he went as far East as
Washington, Philadelphia and New York. This latter
journey lasted more than a year; one might have
expected it to open before him an immense horizon;
yet he seems, to judge from his published letters, to
have experienced not one of the characteristic thoughts
or feelings of youth. Never a hint of melancholy, of
aspiration, of hope, depression, joy, even ambition ! His
letters are as full of statistics as the travel-reports of an
engineer, and the only sensation he seems to experience
is the tell-tale sensation of home-sickness. He has no
wish to investigate life, to think, to feel, to love. He
is, in fact, under a spell. He is inhibited, he inhibits
himself, even from seeking on his own account that vital
experience which is the stuff of the creative life.

Then, suddenly, comes a revolutionary change. He
hears "the old call of the river." He becomes a pilot.

Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should
have embarked upon this career with such passionate
earnestness, that the man whom the world was to know
later — "dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details"
— should ever have persisted in acquiring the "abso-
lutely limitless" knowledge it necessitated. He explains
it by the fact that Mark Twain "loved the river in its
every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the
river, but a steamboat ; and still more, perhaps, the free-
dom of the pilot's life and its prestige." Mr. Paine

44 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

omits one important particular. "We have seen that in
Mark Twain two opposed groups of wishes — the wish
to be an artist and the wish to win his mother's ap-
proval, to stand in with pioneer society — were strug-
gling for survival. When we turn to his account of
the Mississippi pilots, their life, their activities, their
social position, we can see that in this career both these
wishes were satisfied concurrently. Piloting was, in the
first place, a preeminently respectable and lucrative
occupation; besides this, of all the pioneer types of the
Mississippi region, the pilot alone embodied in any large
measure the characteristics of the artist: in him alone
these characteristics were permitted, in him they were
actually encouraged, to survive.

We cannot understand why this was so without bear-
ing in mind a peculiarity of the pioneer regime upon
which we shall have occasion more than once to dwell.
Mr. Herbert Croly has described it in "The Promise of
American Life." "In such a society," says Mr. Croly,
"a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the
most rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was
out of place and was really inefficient. His finished
product did not serve its temporary purpose much bet-
ter than did the current careless and hasty product
and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted
an implied criticism upon the easy methods of his neigh-
bors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship
which naturally arises among a group of men who sub-
mit good-naturedly and uncritically to current stand-
ards. It is no wonder, consequently, that the pioneer
democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man
with a special vocation and high standards of achieve-
ment. Such a man did insist upon being in certain
respects better than the average ; and under the pre-
valent economic social conditions he did impair the
consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly
placed such a high value. Consequently, they half

The Candidate for Life 45

unconsciously sought to suppress men with special voca-
tions. ' '

Here, of course, we have what is by far the most
important fact to be considered in any study of the
creative life in the West ; as we shall see, Mark Twain
remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own
view of the "special vocation" of literature. "What is
to be noted now is that the pilot was an exception, and
the only exception in the Mississippi region, to this
general social law. In Nevada, in California, where
Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin
his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system
described by Mr. Croly reigned in its most extreme and
uncompromising form; every one had to be a jack-of-
all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The entire
welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the
Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before
the war, upon the expert skill of the pilot ; for the river
traffic to be secure at all, he alone, but he at least, had
to be a craftsman, a specialist of the very highest order.
There were no signal-lights along the shore, we are
told ; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars ;
the pilot had to know every bank and dead tree and
reef, every cut-off and current, every depth of water,
by day and by night, in the whole stretch of twelve
hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he
had to "smell danger in the dark and read the surface
of the water as an open page." Upon his mastery of
that "supreme science," as it was called, hung all the
civilization of the river folk, their trade, their inter-
course with the great centers, everything that stirred
them out of the inevitable stagnation of an isolated
village existence. The pilot was, consequently, in every
sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a "sovereign."
Not only did he receive commands from nobody but
he was authorized to resent even the merest suggestion.
"I have seen a boy of eighteen," Mark Twain tells us,

46 The Ordeal of Mark Twain.

"taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed
almost certain destruction, and the aged captain stand-
ing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless
to interfere." Pilots were, he says, "treated with
marked deference by all, officers and servants and pas-
sengers," and he adds naively: "I think pilots were
about the only people I ever knew who failed to show,
in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of travel-
ing foreign princes." Above all, and this was the
anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of
experience in American society, recurs with most sig-
nificant emphasis, the pilot was morally free: thanks
to the indispensability of that highly skilled vocation
of his, he and he alone possessed the sole condition with-
out which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow.
"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggera-
tion, "was the only unfettered and entirely independent
human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but
the manacled servants of parliaments and the people
. . . the editor of a newspaper . . . clergymen . . .
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. ' '

Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the
pilot became a sort of channel for all the aesthetic
idealism of the Mississippi region? "When I was a
boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent
ambition among my comrades in our village. That was,
to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of
other sorts, but they were only transient." Think of
the squalor of those villages, their moral and material
squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty
taboos : repression at one extreme, eruption at the other,
and shiftlessness for a golden mean. "You can hardly

The Candidate for Life

47

imagine,' ' said Mark Twain once, "you can hardly
imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in
as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down. ' '
They were indeed "floating enchantments," beautiful,
comely, clean — first rate, for once ! not second, or third,
or fourth — light and bright and gay, radiating a sort
of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its
cheerfulness, its trim vigor. And what an air they had
of going somewhere, of getting somewhere, of knowing
what they were about, of having an orbit of their own
and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it!
Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of
mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny
opportunism. And the pilot ! Mark Twain tells how he
longed to be a cabin boy, to do any menial work about
the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and their
worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the
breathless, the fructifying adoration of a young ap-
prentice in the atelier of some great master of the
Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul
is that of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself
is indeed the natural passion of the novice lavished, for
love of the metier, upon the only creative — shall I say?
— at least the only purposive figure in all his experience.
Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the
Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a
lightning pilot!" It was in this fashion that comrades
of the wheel spoke of one another. "You just ought
to have seen him take this boat through Helena Cross-
ing. I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if
he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond breast-pin
piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do
if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric
magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume,
too, the visible sign of a salary as great as that of the
Vice-President of the United States, he was a privileged
person. But the accent is unmistakable. It is an out-

48 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

burst of pure aesthetic emotion, produced by a supreme
exercise of personal craftsmanship.

Mark Twain had his chance at last ! * 'I wandered for
ten years," he said in later life, when he used to assert
so passionately that man is a mere chameleon, who takes
his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of his
environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the
guidance and dictatorship of Circumstance. . . . Then
Circumstance arrived with another turning-point of my
life — a new link. ... I had made the acquaintance of
a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he
consented. I became a pilot." He had come to believe
that he had drifted into piloting and out of it quite as
aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many
other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other
assertion that to be a pilot was the "permanent ambi-
tion" of his childhood. Two instincts had impelled him
all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and respect-
able position of which his mother would approve and
the instinct to develop himself as an artist: already as
a printer he had exhibited an enthusiastic interest in
craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a neat
worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and
industrious;" "he set a clean proof," his brother Orion
said. "Whatever required intelligence and care and
imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those printing days,
* ' was given to Sam Clemens. ' ' He had naturally gravi-
tated, therefore, toward the one available channel that
offered him the training his artistic instinct required.
And the proof is that Mark Twain, in order to take
advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted to all
manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly un-
willing to submit to at any later period,, of his life.

In the first place, he had no money, and he was under
a powerful compulsion to make money at almost any
cost. Yet, in order to pass his apprenticeship, he agreed
not only to forgo all remuneration until his apprentice-

The Candidate for Life 49

ship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the
five hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which
was the price of his tuition. And then, most striking
fact of all, he took pains, endless, unremitting pains, to
make himself competent. It was a tremendous task,
how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life
on the Mississippi": "even considering his old-time
love of the river and the pilot's trade," says Mr. Paine,
"it is still incredible that a man of his temperament
could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles."
The answer is to be found only in the fact that, em-
barked as he was at last on a career that called su-
premely for self-reliance, independence, initiative, judg-
ment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. ' ' Sum
all the gifts that man is endowed with, ' ' he writes to his
brother Orion, "and we give our greatest share of ad-
miration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen,
I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and
worship it ! I want a man to — I want you to — take up a
line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very
devil." Is this the Mark Twain who, in later life, read-
ing in Seutonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man in wide
repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin
of the book, "I guess this is where our line starts"?

Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must
have seemed in that shiftless half-world of the Missis-
sippi, and he was following it for dear life. We note
in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of his
later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own
boat; he is, if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at
least a frankly poetic one, meditating at night in his
pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of existence, of
creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny, ' ' overflow-
ing with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of
control. "I used to have inspirations," he said once,
" as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all
sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got

50 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

into my books by and by and furnished me with many
a chapter. I can trace the effect of those nights through
most of my books in one way and another." He who
had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, who
had run away from school with the inevitability of
water flowing down hill, set himself to study, to learn,
with a passion of eagerness. Earlier, at the time when
he had picked up that flying leaf from the life of Joan
of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration
to study Latin and German; but the impulse had not
lasted, could not last. Now, however, nothing was too
difficult for him. He bought text-books and applied
himself when he was off watch and in port. ''The
pilots, ' ' says Mr. Paine, ' ' regarded him as a great reader
— a student of history, travels, literature, and the sci-
ences— a young man whom it was an education as well
as an entertainment to know."

Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set.
"How to Take Life" is the subject of one of his jot-
tings : ' ' Take it just as though it was — as it is — an earn-
est, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you
were born to the task of performing a merry part in it
— as though the world had waited for your coming. . . .
Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors
earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway be-
comes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of
some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and
it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold
of life with a purpose. The miracle or the power that
elevates the few is to be found in their industry, appli-
cation and perseverance, under the promptings of a
brave, determined spirit."

It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile
sentiment: it is the emotion of a man who feels himself
in the center of the road of his own destiny.

CHAPTER III

THE GILDED AGE

"The American democracy follows its ascending march, uni«
form, majestic as the laws of being,v sure of itself as the decrees
of eternity. "

George Bancroft.

YOU conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread
in his hands, feeling his way with firmer grasp,
with surer step, through the dim labyrinth of that pio-
neer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an
artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And
what a magnificent nursery for his talent he has found
at last ! * ' In that brief, sharp schooling, ' ' he said once,
"I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all
the different types of human nature that are to be
found in fiction, biography or history. When I find
a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I gener-
ally take a warm personal interest in him, for the rea-
son that I have known him before — met him on the
river. ' '

Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it
ought to equip him for a supreme interpretation of
American life; it ought to serve him as the streets of
London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia
served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served
Whitman. But will it? Only if the artist in him can
overcome the pioneer. Those great writers used their
experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound
personal vision; rising above it themselves, they im-

5i

52 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

posed upon it the mold of their own individuality.
Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread in his hands
long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his
mind with knowledge of men and their ways; he is
forming indispensable habits of mind, self-confidence,
self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, he is re-
deeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found
himself, has his nature had time to crystallize? No,
and the time is up. Circumstance steps in and cuts the
golden thread, and all is lost.

The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi,
put an end forever to the glories of the old river traffic.
That unique career, the pilot's career, which had af-
forded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative edu-
cation, came to an abrupt end.

Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than
the change instantly registered by this fact in Mark
Twain's life. What happened to him? He has told us
in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that ex-
ceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as
a soldier in the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was
undoubtedly right in feeling that he had no cause for
shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a
military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen
ankle. The whole story simply reflects the confusion
and misunderstanding with which, especially in the
border States, the Civil "War began. What it does re-
veal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of in-
fantility, in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the
character of any man of twenty-six and especially one
who, a few weeks before, had been a river "sovereign,"
the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy
and purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen.
They met, that amateur battalion, in a secret place on
the outskirts of Hannibal, and there, says Mr. Paine,
"they planned how they would sell their lives on the
field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have

The Gilded Age 53

done if it had thought about playing 'war* instead of
'Indian' and ' Pirate' and 'Bandit' with fierce raids on
peach orchards and melon patches/' Mark Twain's
brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the
characteristics of a ' ' throw-back, ' ' a reversion to a previ-
ous infantile frame of mind. Was the apparent control
which he had established over his life merely illusory,
then? No, it was real enough as long as it was forti-
fied by the necessary conditions: had those conditions
continued a little longer, one feels certain, that self-con-
trol would have become organic and Mark Twain would
never have had to deny ' ' free will, ' ' would never, in later
years, have been led to assert so passionately that man
is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independ-
ence, of self-determination, was so new to this man who
had passed his whole adolescence in his mother's leading-
strings, the old, dependent, chaotic, haphazard pioneer
instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, that the mo-
ment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped
back into the boy he had been before. He had lost his
one opportunity, the one guideway that Western life
could afford the artist in him. For four years his life
had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship : noth-
ing stood between him now and a world given over to
exploitation.

A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of
mind, committing himself gaily to chance, that he went
West with his brother Orion to the Nevada gold-fields.
One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of the
pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of
action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil,"
jotting in his note-book eager and confident reflections
on the duty of ' ' taking hold of life with a purpose. ' ' In
these words from ' ' Roughing It, ' ' he pictures the change
in his mood : ' ' Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.
Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe — an old, rank, de-
licious pipe — ham and eggs and scenery, a 'down-grade,'

54 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart
— these make happiness. It is what all the ages have
struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is
"on the loose," you see; that will, that purpose have
become a bore even to think about! And who could
wish him less human ? Only one who knows the fearful
retribution his own soul is going to exact of him. He is
innocently, frankly yielding himself to life, unaware
in his joyous sense of freedom that he is no longer really
free, that he is bound once more by all the compulsions
of his childhood.

But now, in order to understand what happened to
Mark Twain, we shall have to break the thread of his
personal history. "The influences about [the human be-
ing]," he wrote, years later, "creafe his preferences, his
aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion.
He creates none of these things for himself." That, as
we shall see, was Mark Twain's deduction from his own
life. Consequently, we must glance now at the epoch
and the society to which, at this critical moment of his
career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing him-
self.

What was that epoch ? It was the round half-century
that began in the midst of the Civil War, reached its
apogee in the seventies and eighties and its climacteric
in the nineties of the last century, with the beginning
of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to
an indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven,
shortly before the war of 1914. It was the epoch of
industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain
called it in the title of his only novel, the age when
presidents were business men and generals were busi-
ness men and preachers were business men, when the
whole psychic energy of the American people was
absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of the
material resources of the continent and business enter-

The Gilded Age 55

prise was virtually the only recognized sphere of action.
One recalls the career of Charles Francis Adams. A
man of powerful individual character, he was certainly
intended by nature to carry on the traditions of dis-
interested public effort he had inherited from three
generations of ancestors. Casting about for a career
immediately after the Civil War, however, he was able
to find in business alone, as he has told us in his Auto-
biography, the proper scope for his energies. ' ' Survey-
ing the whole field," he says, "instinctively recognizing
my unfitness for the law, I fixed on the railroad system
as the most developing force and largest field of the
day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how
fully, by the end of his life, he had come to accept the
values of his epoch — in spite of that tell-tale ' ' otherwise-
mindedness,, of his — we can see from these candid
words : " As to politics, it is a game ; art, science, litera-
ture, we know how fashions change! . . . What I now
find I would really have liked is something quite differ-
ent. I would like to have accumulated — and ample and
frequent opportunity for so doing was offered me —
one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up
into the tens and scores of millions — what is vulgarly
known as 'money to burn' ... I would like to be the
nineteenth century John Harvard — the John-IIarvard-
of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that
than be Historian or General or President."

Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can Amer-
ica be said to have offered "a career open to all talents."
It offered only one career, that of sharing in the mate-
rial development of the continent. Into this one channel
passed all the religious fervor of the race.

I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a
good novel; it is, artistically, almost an unqualified
failure. And yet, as inferior works often do, it con-
veys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a
story which, in default of any other and better, might

56 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

well be called the Odyssey of modern America. Philip
Sterling, the hero, is in love with Euth Bolton, the
daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to make
money so that he may marry her and establish a home.
Philip goes West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled
in his quest again and again. "He still had faith that
there was coal in that mountain. He had made a pic-
ture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the
tunnel. . . . Perhaps some day — he felt it must be so
some day — he would strike coal. But what if he did?
Would he be alive to care for it then? . . . No, a man
wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to
him. . . . Philip had to look about him. He was like
Adam: the world was all before him where to choose.' '
Routed by the stubborn mountain, he persists in his
dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three
or four times in as many weeks he said to himself:
'Am I a visionary? I must be a visionary!' " His
workers desert him: "after that, Philip fought his bat-
tle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am
conquered. ... I have got to give it up. . . . But I am
not conquered. I will go and work for money, and come
back and have another fight with fate. Ah, me, it may
be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when
the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full
of it! "Philip in luck," we are told, "had become
suddenly a person of consideration, whose speech was
freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant.
The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a
golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as
if they were solid wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes
back to Ruth, and they are married, and the Gilded Age
is justified in its children.

Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-
Odyssey of our civilization ? It is the pattern, one might
almost say, of all the stories of modern America; and
what distinguishes it from other national epopees is

The Gilded Age 57

the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of
money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented
on the truly religious character of American business.
"The Gilded Age" enables us to verify that observation
at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure
in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the
"faith" of discovering it; he sees himself as another
"Adam," as a "hermit" consecrated to that cause; he
thinks of money as the treasure you long for in your
youth when the world is fresh to you ; he invokes Provi-
dence to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in
his ardent longing for it, as a "visionary"; he speaks
of "fighting his battle alone," of "another fight with
fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the
mere zeal of the mere votary ; it is, quite specifically, the
religious zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip
Sterling is to himself in the process, so he is to others
in the event : ' ' The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-
mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are
repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in
other words, has become the prophet.

We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least,
wealth meant to Americans something else than mere
material possession, and the pursuit of it nothing less
than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration-
of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe
Thayer's "Life and Letters of John Hay":

That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on
your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a judg-
ment on your laziness and vices, or on your improvidence. The
world is a moral world, which it would not be if virtue and vice
received the same rewards. This summary, though confessedly
crude, may help, if it be not pushed too close, to define John
Hay's position. The property you own — be it a tiny cottage or a
palace — means so much more than the tangible object! With it
are bound up whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization.
So an attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization.

58 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

Here, surely, we have one of those supremely char-
acteristic utterances that convey the note of whole
societies. That industry and foresight are the cardinal
virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished
not by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their
comparative results in material wealth, that the insti-
tution of private property is " bound up" with "what-
ever in historic times has stood for Civilization, ' '
barring, of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha
and Francis of Assisi, and most of the art, thought and
literature of the world, is a doctrine that can hardly
seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of
the history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social
creed of John Hay, and John Hay was not even a busi-
ness man; he was a poet and a man of letters. When
Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the
will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a super-
stition, ' ' he was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form,
the general view of thinkers and poets and even of
economists during these latter years, a view the imagina-
tive mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very
significant, therefore, to find American men of letters
opposing, by this insistence upon the supremacy of
material values, what must have been their own normal
personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of mod-
ern liberal culture — for John Hay was far from unique ;
even Walt Whitman said : ' ' Democracy looks with suspi-
cious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor and on those
out of business; she asks for men and women with
occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and
with cash in the bank." Industry and foresight, de-
voted to the pursuit of wealth — here one has at once
the end and the means of the simple, universal morality
of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him
alone everything was forgiven, who succeeded. "The
following dialogue," wrote Dickens, in his "American
Notes, ' ' ' ' I have held a hundred times : ' Is it not a very

The Gilded Age 59

disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so
should be acquiring a large property by the most in-
famous and odious means, and notwithstanding all the
crimes of which he has been guilty, should be tolerated
and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance,
is he not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.'
'He has been kicked, and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes,
sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, debased and prof-
ligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then,
what is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.' M
Smartness was indeed, for the Gilded Age, the divine
principle that moved the sun and the other stars.

We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this
morality unless we realize that the business men of the
generation after the Civil War were, essentially, still
pioneers and that all their habits of thought were the
fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole coun-
try was, in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required
an absolute homogeneity of feeling : almost every Ameri-
can family had some sort of stake in the West and
acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of suc-
cess, that instinctive belief that there was something
sacred in the pursuit of wealth without which the
pioneers themselves could hardly have survived. With-
out the chance of an indeterminate financial reward,
they would never have left their homes in the East or
in Europe, without it they could never, under the im-
mensely difficult conditions they encountered, have
transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of adventure
into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it
was not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great
wealth? Faith in the possibility of a lucky strike, the
fact that immeasurable riches lay before some of them
at least, that the mountains were full of gold and the
lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to
rise up some day in this wilderness, that these fertile
territories, these great rivers, these rich forests lay there

60 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

brimming over with fortune for a race to come — that
vision was ever in their minds. And since through
private enterprise alone could that consummation ever
come — for the group-spirit of the colonist had not been
bred in the American nature — private enterprise be-
came for the pioneer a sort of obligation to the society
of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady
welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well
he was also serving America. To the pioneer, in short,
private and public interests were identical and the wor-
ship of success was actually a social cult.

It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute
homogeneity of feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous
folk before the Civil War and the practical effect of
pioneering and the business regime was to keep us so,
to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of
the homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since
Herbert Spencer stated it, has been generally conceived
as the note of true human progress. The effect of busi-
ness upon the individual has never been better described
than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I
have known, and known tolerably well, a good many
'successful' men — 'big' financially — men famous during
the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do
not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known
would I care to meet again, either in this world or the
next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with
the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of
mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially
unattractive and uninteresting. ' ' Why this is so Mr.
Herbert Croly has explained in ' ' The Promise of Ameri-
can Life": "A man's individuality is as much com-
promised by success under the conditions imposed by
such a system as it is by failure. His actual occupation
may tend to make his individuality real and fruitful;
but the quality of the work is determined by a merely
acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby usually

The Gilded Age 61

debarred from obtaining any edifying personal inde-
pendence or any peculiar personal distinction. Differ-
ent as American business men are one from another in
temperament, circumstances and habits, they have a
way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their
individualities are forced into a common mold, be-
cause the ultimate measure of the value of their work
is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash."
Such is the result of the business process, and the suc-
cess of the process required, during the epoch of indus-
trial pioneering, a virtually automatic sacrifice of almost
everything that makes individuality significant. "You
no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has
drawn from the European war : he means that, in order
to attain the collective goal, the individual must neces-
sarily submerge himself in the collective mind, that the
mental uniform is no less indispensable than the physi-
cal. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere
assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity
of what is called the herd: how much more so that
extreme form of individuality, the creative spirit, whose
whole tendency is sceptical, critical, realistic, disruptive !
"It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly says,
"that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and
aversion the man with a special vocation and high stand-
ards of achievement." In fact, one was required not
merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs and
ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes
of the herd.

For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress
those influences that were hostile to their immediate
efficiency: they were obliged also to romanticize their
situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in
feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could
they have carried out their task if they had not been
blinded to the difficulties, the hideousness of it? The
myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as one

62 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored
veil the pioneers threw over the continent in order that
it might be developed? Never were there such illu-
sionists : they were like men in a chloroform dream, and
it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an
anaesthetic. Without the feeling that they were the
children of destiny, without the social dream that some
vast boon to humanity hung upon their enterprise, with-
out the personal dream of immeasurable success for
themselves, who would ever have endured such volun-
tary hardships? One recalls poor John Clemens, Mark
Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual motion machine
that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its in-
ventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Ten-
nessee land" that buoyed up the spirit of Squire
Hawkins, even while it brought him wretchedness and
death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated
with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the
distinction between reality and illusion, he is indeed
the archtypical American of the pioneering epoch. One
remembers him in his miserable shanty in the Tennessee
wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked
and half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless
walls, the crazy clock, the battered stove. To Colonel
Sellers that establishment is a feudal castle, his wife is
a chateleine, his children the baron's cubs, and when
he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass
of the broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in
truth, the hospitable blaze upon the hearth of the great
hall ? To such a degree has the promoter 's instinct, the
"wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of his brain
that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about
him the city which is destined some day to rise up there.
The vision of the material opportunities among which
he lives has supplanted his reason and his five senses
and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of reality.
The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these

The Gilded Age 63

illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain
used to tell, the story of Jim Gillis and the California
plums, is emblematic of this. Jim Gillis, the original of
Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to whose
solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and
his friends used to resort. One day an old squaw came
along selling some green plums. One of the men care-
lessly remarked that while these plums, "California
plums," might be all right he had never heard of any
one eating them. "There was no escape after that,"
says Mr. Paine; "Jim had to buy some of those plums,
whose acid was of the hair-lifting, aqua-fortis variety,
and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding sugar,
trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and
then, boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like delicious-
ness. He gave the others a taste by and by — a wither-
ing, corroding sup — and they derided him and rode him
down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful
brew, and though for days his mouth was like fire he
still referred to the luscious, health-giving joys of the
1 California' plums." How much of the romanticism
of the pioneers there is in that story ! It was the same
over-determination that led them to call their settle-
ments by such names as Eden, like that wretched
swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that made them
inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly menda-
cious pictures of their future, that made it obligatory
upon every one to "boost, not knock," a slogan still of
absolute authority in certain parts of the West.

Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid
block: it would not tolerate anything that attacked the
ideal of success, that made the country seem unattrac-
tive or the future uncertain. Every sort of criticism,
in fact, was regarded as lese-majeste to the folk-spirit
of America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-
minded, could tell the truth about us without jeopardiz-
ing his life, liberty and reputation. Who does not

64 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

remember the story of Dickens's connection with Amer-
ica, the still more notable story of the good Captain
Basil Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print
some of the less attractive traits of pioneer life, was
publicly accused of being an agent of the British gov-
ernment on a special mission to blacken and defame this
country? Merely to describe facts as they were was
regarded as a sort of treachery among a people who,
having next to no intellectual interest in the truth, had,
on the other hand, a strong emotional interest in the
perversion of it. An American who went abroad and
stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reason-
able time, was regarded as a turncoat and a deserter;
if he remained at home he was obliged to accept the
uniform on pain of being called a crank and of actually,
by the psychological law that operates in these cases,
becoming one. There is no type in our social history
more significant than that ubiquitous figure, the ''village
atheist." One recalls Judge Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead
Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' Society of
which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge
Driscoll," says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker
and still hold his place in society, because he was the
person of most consequence in the community, and there-
fore could venture to go his own way and follow out
his own notions." No respect for independence and
individuality, in short, entitled a man to regulate his
own views on life ; quite on the contrary, that was the
privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves
superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were,
by force. If you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you
could wrest the possession of your own mind: by that
time, in any case, it was usually so soured and warped
and embittered as to have become safely impotent.

As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy
actuated all America against the creative spirit. In an
age when every sensitive mind in England was in full

The Gilded Age 65

revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating forces
of a * ' progress ' ' that promised nothing but the ultimate
collapse of civilization ; when all Europe was alive with
prophets, aristocratic prophets, proletarian prophets,
religious and philosophical and humanitarian and eco-
nomic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name
of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of
capitalistic industrialism ; in an age glorified by nothing
but the beautiful anger of the Tolstoys and the Marxes,
the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins and the
Morrises — in that age America, innocent, ignorant,
profoundly untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its
own manifest and peculiar destiny. We were, in fact,
in our provincial isolation, in just the state of the
Scandinavian countries during the European wars of
1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his auto-
biography: " While the intellectual life languished, as
a plant droops in a close, confined place, the people were
self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and fell into
a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The
cultivated, and especially the half -cultivated, public in
Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt
of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism they
would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed
that they were the free, mighty North, which would lead
the cause of the peoples to victory — and they woke up
unfree, impotent, ignorant. "

Yes, even New England, the old home of so many
brave and virile causes, even New England, which had
cared so much for the freedom of the individual, had'
ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the
human spirit. New England had been literally emascu-
lated by the Civil War, or rather by the exodus of
young men westward which was more or less synchron-
ous with the war. The continent had been opened up,
the rural population of the East had been uprooted,
had been set in motion, had formed habits of wander-

66 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

ing. The war, like a fever, had as it were stimulated
the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a
natural attraction the blood of the head, which New
England had been, had flowed into those remote mem-
bers, the Western territories.

In " Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the
population of the gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigor-
ous, restless population in those days," he says. "It
was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men
— not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stal-
wart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push
and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute
that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent man-
hood— the very pick and choice of the world's glorious
ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping
veterans — none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving,
strong-handed young giants. ... It was a splendid
population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained
sloths stayed at home — you never find that sort of people
among pioneers." Those gold-fields of the West! One
might almost imagine that Nature itself was awake and
conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and calcu-
lating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farth-
est edge of the continent in order to captivate the highest
imaginations, in order to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over
that vast, forbidding intervening space, a population
hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not
to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the
claims of the future. But what was the result? One
is often told by New Englanders who were children in
the years just after the war how the young men left the
towns and villages never to return. And has not a
whole school of story-writers and, more recently, of
poets, familiarized us with the life of this New England
countryside during the generation that followed — those
villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants
of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a

The Gilded Age 67

population only half sane owing to solitude and the
decay of social interests? What a civilization they pic-
ture, those novels and those poems! — a civilization rid-
dled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death.
Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of
this generation as abolition and perfectionism, philoso-
phy and poetry, all those manifestations of a surplus of
psychic energy, had been of the generation before. New
England, in short, and with New England the whole
spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition
of a neurotic anaemia in which it has remained so
largely to this day.

This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston,
that petrifaction of its higher levels which was illus-
trated in so tragi-comic a way by the unhappy episode
of Mark Twain 's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not
the fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and
Longfellow and Dr. Holmes, that he was made to feel,
in his own phrase, ' ' like a barkeeper in heaven. ' ' They
had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it
was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them
that had left them high and dry as the ark on Ararat.
They continued, survivals as they were of a happier age
when a whole outlying population had in a measure
shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think
and dream, just as if nothing had happened. They were
not offended by Mark Twain 's unlucky wit : Boston was
offended, Boston which, no longer open to the winds of
impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols
of an extinct cause that had grown all the more sacro-
sanct in their eyes the less they participated in it. For
the real forces of Boston society had gone the way of
all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins
had not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but
they had followed them, discreetly, in spirit ; they saved
their faces by remaining, like Charles Francis Adams,
"otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in Kan-

68 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

sas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold
of the stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individual-
ism of the American past had capitulated to the golden
eagle: literature, culture, the conservation of the ideal
had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was not
women only, not the sort of women who had so often
tended the bright light of literature in France ! It was
the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left behind with her own
desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men west-
ward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony
by default, and the New England spinster, with her
restricted experience, her complicated repressions, and
all her glacial taboos of good form, had become the
pacemaker in the arts.

One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined
figurehead of this new regime. It was the sign of the
decay of artistic vitality in New England that the old
literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner
to carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells,
the first alien editor of The Atlantic Monthly, was
consecrated to the high priesthood by an all but literal
laying on of hands ; and certainly Mr. Howells, already
intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly
appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography
how, having as a young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon
a particularly sordid tragedy, he resolved ever after
to avert his eyes from the darker side of life — an inci-
dent that throws rather a glaring light upon what later
became his prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects
of life are the more American": the dogma, as we see,
was merely a rationalization of his own unconscious
desire neither to see in America nor to say about Amer-
ica anything that Americans in general did not wish
to have seen or said. His confessed aim was to reveal
the charm of the commonplace, an essentially passive
and feminine conception of his art ; and while his super-
ficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dis-

The Gilded Age 69

pensed him at the same time from any of those drastic
imaginative reconstructions of life and society that are
of the essence of all masculine fiction. In short, he had
attained a thoroughly denatured point of view and one
nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate any
assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the emi-
nence of his position and his truly beautiful and dis-
tinguished talent made him what Mark Twain called
"the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from
whose decision there is no appeal. ' ' The spokesman, the
mild and submissive dictator of an age in which women
wrote half the books and formed the greater part of
the reading public, he diffused far and wide the notion
of the artist's role through which he had found his own
salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted im-
plicitly the religious, moral and social taboos of the
time.

I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious
conspiracy actuated all America against the creative life.
For is it not plain now that the cultural domination of
this emasculated New England simply played into the
hands of the business regime? The taboos of the one
supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public
opinion of both sexes and of all classes, East and West
alike, formed a closed ring as it were against any mani-
festation of the vital, restless, critical, disruptive spirit
of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the fact,
or the illusion, that America was a "young" country,
that impelled Henry James and Whistler, and virtually
every other American who possessed a vital sense of
the artistic vocation, to seek what necessarily became
an exotic development in Europe. It was this that drove
Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived
at bay during the rest of his life, carrying on a per-
petual guerrilla warfare against the whole literary con-
fraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, that
led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners ' ' anony-

70 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

mously, and Henry Adams his novel, " Democracy. ' '
"With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of
American life these men were completely disillusioned,
but motives of self-preservation, motives that would
certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding
type before the Civil War, restrained them from impair-
ing, by strong assertions of individual judgment, "the
consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly
placed such a high value." The tradition of literary
independence had never been strong in America; that
the artist and the thinker are types whose integrity is
vital to society and who are under a categorical impera-
tive to pursue their vocation frankly and disinterestedly
was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American
minds; our authors generally had accepted the com-
placent dictum of William Cullen Bryant that literature
is "a good staff but a bad crutch," not a vocation, in
short, but an avocation. A few desperate minds justi-
fied themselves by representing the artist as a sort of
glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from
the prevailing materialism as to say that art was under
a divine sanction : we can see from the letters of George
Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, these
admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be
devoured by theory. In general, however, the new dis-
pensation bred a race of writers who accommodated
themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age that
required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining,
as a sop to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in
form.

Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole
nation was quiescent : no specter intruded upon the jolly
family party of prosperous America; there was no one
to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success,
for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately
wrote a glowing eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley
of Democracy. "It is in keeping with the cheery con-

The Gilded Age 71

tentment of the West," he said, "that it believes that
it has 'at home' or can summon to its R. F. D. box
everything essential to human happiness. " Why, he
added, the West even has poets, admirable poets, repre-
sentative poets ; and among these poets he mentioned the
author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we
have a belated but none the less perfect illustration of
the romantic dualism of the Gilded Age ; for in the very
fact of becoming a cultural possession of the Middle
West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely upsets
Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nichol-
son does not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the
more smiling aspects of life are the more American,"
but that is because he too has averted his eyes from all
the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism
of Mr. Nicholson 's, we have a perfect illustration of the
romantic dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part
literature was obliged to play in it. Essentially, Amer-
ica was not happy; it was a dark jumble of decayed
faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed
desires, of inarticulate misery — read ' ' The Story of a
Country Town" and "A Son of the Middle Border"
and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other nations,
and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-
poetry, or next to none, to express it, to console it ; but
to have said so would have been to "hurt business"!
It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch without sun or
stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing
upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden
and the dried manna of Concord: for the jolly family
party was open to very few and those, moreover, who,
except for their intense family affections and a certain
hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at
fifty-five, had forgone the best things life has to offer.
But was it not for the welfare of all that they so dili
gently promulgated the myth of America's "manifest
destiny ' ' ? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task

72 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

of pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also
because, after the disillusionments of the present epoch,
that myth will prove to have a certain beautiful resid-
uum of truth.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE CRUCIBLE

"The American proposes to realize his individuality freely
and fully, but so long as he is master of his person and free to
choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly consenting that
some other person, better qualified or more competent, should
choose in his place. From the instant when he can do what he
will, he easily wills what he is asked to will. "

Gustave Eodeigues : The People of Action.

RECOLLECT, now, the mood in which Mark Twain
went West to the gold-fields of Nevada — the mood
of a "regular fellow.* ' Was it not one that exposed
him, in a peculiar sense, to the contagion of the Gilded
Age ? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played
about in the woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp
life" to build the fence about a timber claim which he
and a comrade had located. He was out for a good
time, oblivious of everything else and with all the un-
consciousness of a child. A moralist would have said
that the devil had already marked him out for destruc-
tion.

Recollect how, on the river, Mark Twain had im-
pressed his confreres of the wheel : * * the pilots regarded
him as a great reader — a student of history, travels,
literature and the sciences — a young man whom it was
an education as well as an entertainment to know."
Now, in Nevada, says Mr. Paine, "his hearers generally
regarded him as an easy-going, indolent good fellow with
a love of humor — with talent, perhaps — but as one not
likely ever to set the world afire." Does not that sug-
gest a certain disintegration of the spirit? We infer

73

74 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

this, in any case, from the sudden change in his personal
appearance, always a sort of barometric symptom in
Mark Twain 's life. ' ' Lately a river sovereign and dandy
■ — in fancy percales and patent leathers — in white duck
and striped shirts — he had become the roughest of
rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirts,
coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of the
heavy cowskin boots. ' ' Merely, you imagine, the natural
change in dress that any gold-seeker would have made?
No: ''he went even further than others and became
a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable sur-
render of the pride and consciousness of his individu-
ality ! And whoever doubts the significance of this may
well compare the tone of his utterances as a pilot with
such characteristic notes of his Nevada life as this:
"If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing
vagabond I could make [journalism] pay me $20,000
a year. But I don't suppose I shall ever be any ac-
count." The reversion to that earlier frame of mind,
in short, had not made this man, who was approaching
thirty, a boy again : it made him behave like a boy, it
made him, half the time, feel like a boy, but it revealed
in him, nevertheless, the indisputable signs of a certain
dereliction from some path of development his nature
had commanded him to follow. The artist in him had
lost its guiding-line; he was "broken down" again, just
as he had been after his father's death; his spirit had
become plastic once more. He was ready, in a word,
to take the stamp of his new environment.

Now, whatever was true of America during the Gilded
Age was doubly true of Nevada, where, as Mr. Paine
says, "all human beings, regardless of previous affilia-
tions and convictions, were flung into the common
f using-pot and recast into the general mold of pioneer. ' '
Life in the gold-fields was, in fact, an infinite intensi-
fication of pioneering, it was a sort of furnace in which
all the elements of human nature were transmuted into

In the Crucible 75

a single white flame, an incandescence of the passion of
avarice. If we are to accept Mark Twain's description
in "Roughing It" of the "flush times" in Virginia City,
we can see that the spirit of the artist had about as
good a chance of survival and development there as a
butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown
to be the 'livest' town, for its age and population, that
America had ever produced. The side-walks swarmed
with people. The streets themselves were just as
crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other
vehicles. . . . Joy sat on every countenance, and there
was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye that told
of the money-getting schemes that were seething in
every brain and the high hope that held sway in every
heart. Money was as plenty as dust. . . . There were
military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks,
hotels, theaters, 'hurdy-gurdy houses/ wide-open gam-
bling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions,
street-fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill
every fifteen steps, a dozen breweries, and half a dozen
jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk
of building a church. The 'flush times' were in mag-
nificent flower ! . . . The great ' Comstock lode ' stretched
its opulent length straight through the town from North
to South, and every mine on it was in diligent process
of development."

This was the spirit of Mark Twain's new environment,
a spirit inflexibly opposed, as we can see, to the develop-
ment of individuality. Had Mark Twain been free, it
might have been a matter of indifference to him; he
might have gone his own way and amused himself with
the astonishing spectacle of the gold-fields and then
taken "himself off again. But Mark Twain was not free ;
he was, on the contrary, bound in such a way that, far
from being able to stand aloof from his environment,
he had to make terms with it. For what obligations had
he not incurred ! To become such a conventional citizen

76 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

as his father would have approved of, to make money
and restore the fallen fortunes of his family — that old
pledge was fixed in the back of his mind, where it had
been confirmed by his failure to discover and assert any
independent principle of his own. Furthermore, he now
had his own financial record to live up to. It was the
lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had
originally enabled him to adopt it, and we know what
pride he had had in his "great triumph," in being a
somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered it
a " disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they
were gentleman's sons, these Clemensos! He had had,
in short, a chance to exercise and educate his creative
instinct while at the same time doing what was expected
of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line,
more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at
twenty-three, on the river, had been $250 a month, a
vastly greater income certainly than his father had ever
earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had be-
come, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens family.
"His brother Orion was ten years older," says Mr.
Paine, "but he had not the gift of success. By common
consent, the young brother assumed permanently the
position of family counselor and financier." These
circumstances, I say, compelled Mark Twain to make
terms with public opinion. He could not fall too far
behind the financial pace his piloting life had set for
him, he was bound to recover the prestige that had been
his and to shine once more as a conspicuous and impor-
tant personage, he had to "make good" again, quickly
and spectacularly: that was a duty which had also
become a craving. How strongly he felt it we can see
from one of his Nevada letters in which he declares
earnestly that he will never look upon his mother's face
again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the
"Banner State," until he is a rich man.
What chance was there now for the artist in Mark

In the Crucible 77

Twain to find itself ? A unique opportunity had led him
for four years into the channel of inner development
through a special vocation; but it was only the indis-
pensability of the pilot to the Mississippi river folk that
had obliged them to give him such lordly freedom. No
special vocation was indispensable in Nevada; conse-
quently, no special vocation was tolerated. There, the
pioneer law of which Mr. Croly speaks held absolute
sway: "the man who persisted in one job interfered
with the rough good-fellowship which naturally arises
among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and
uncritically to current standards: his higher standards
and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon
the easy methods of his neighbors' ' and he himself im-
paired "the consistency of feeling upon which the pio-
neers rightly placed such a high value. ' ' Even if Mark
Twain had been fully aware of the demands of his
creative instinct, therefore — and he was anything but
fully aware of them — he could not have fulfilled them
now and at the same time fulfilled his craving for wealth
and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to acquiesce
in the repression of his individuality. His frank free-
dom of sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire
for privacy — all those qualities that revealed his natural
creative instinct — were, from the point of view of his
comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely in so
far as they were "different" or "superior," they had
to be taken down. The frequency and the force of these
manifestations, and the tenacity with which, up to a
certain point, he persisted in indulging in them, made
him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel,"
to use his own word, were the tricks his comrades played
on him. Knowing his highly organized nervous system,
they devised the most complicated methods of torturing
him. There was the incident of the false Meerschaum
pipe, which cut him to the quick, this man who had
been betrayed into uttering words of heartfelt grati-

78 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

tude; there were the diabolical monkey-tricks of Steve
Gillis who, with his "fiendish tendency to mischief, "
was always finding means to prevent him from reading ;
there was the famous hold-up on the Divide on the night
of his lecture: "Mark didn't see it our way/' said one
of the perpetrators of this last practical joke. "He
was mad clear through." In short, every revelation of
his individuality was mercilessly ridiculed, and Mark
Twain was reminded a dozen times a day that his nat-
ural instincts and desires and tendencies were incom-
patible with pioneer life and fatal to the chances of any
man who was pledged to succeed in it. That is why,
though he always retaliated at first, he always yielded
in the end.

Meanwhile, with his creative instinct repressed, his
acquisitive instinct, the race-instinct that rose as the
personal instinct fell, was stimulated to the highest de-
gree. Money was so "easy" in Nevada that one could
hardly think of anything else. "I met three friends
one afternoon," he says in "Roughing It," "who said
they had been buying 'Overman' stock at auction at
eight dollars a foot. One said if I would come up to his
office he would give me fifteen feet; another said he
would add fifteen ; the third said he would do the same.
But I was going after an inquest and could not stop.
A few weeks afterward they sold all their 'Overman'
at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came
around to tell me about it — and also to urge me to accept
of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force
on me. These are actual facts, and I could make the
list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the
truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as twenty-
five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars
a foot ; and they thought no more of it than they would
of offering a guest a cigar. These were 'flush times'
indeed!" In short, in order to stand in with pioneer
society, it was not enough to repress everything in you

In the Crucible 79

that made you "different"; you had to form extrava-
gant habits, you had to treat money like water, and you
had to make it! Mark Twain was not merely obliged
to check his creative instinct; he was obliged to do his
level best to become a millionaire.

It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that
Mark Twain failed as a miner. He had good luck, now
and then, enough to make wealth a tantalizing possi-
bility. He describes, though we are told with exaggera-
tion, how he was once ' ' a millionaire for ten days. ' ' But
he failed as a miner precisely because he was unable
to bring to his new work any of those qualities that had
made him so successful as a pilot. Concentration, perse-
verance, above all, judgment — these were the qualities
that former career had given birth to. The craftsman's
life had instantly matured him; the life of sheer ex-
ploitation, in spite of his sense of duty, in spite of the
incentives of his environment, in spite of the prospects
of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not fuse his
spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns.
He went off prospecting, and with what result? "One
week of this satisfied me, ' ' he said. ' ' I resigned. ' ' Then
he flung himself into quartz-mining. * ' The letters which
went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told,
"are humanly documentary. They are likely to be
staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste
in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excite-
ment; they are not always coherent; they are seldom
humorous, except in a savage way; they are often pro-
fane ; they are likely to be violent. Even the handwrit-
ing has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out
of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the
gambling mania." Then the pendulum swings to the
other extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but ova
wish, to give up everything and go away. * * If Sam had
got that pocket," said one of his comrades, of his last
exploit, ' ' he would have remained a pocket-miner to the

80 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

end of his days"; but he would have got it if he had
been able to bring to the situation any of the qualities
he would have brought to a critical situation on the
Mississippi. It is quite plain that he failed simply be-
cause he did not care enough about money, merely as
money, to succeed. His real self, the artist, in short,
could not develop, and yet, repressed as it was, it pre-
vented him from becoming whole-heartedly anything
else. "VVe shall see this exhibited throughout the whole
of Mark Twain's business life.

So here was Mark Twain face to face with a dilemma.
His unconscious desire was to be an artist, but this
implied an assertion of individuality that was a sin in
the eyes of his mother and a shame in the eyes of society.
On the other hand, society and his mother wanted him
to be a business man, and for this he could not summon
up the necessary powers in himself. The eternal
dilemma of every American writer ! It was the dilemma
which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain solved
by becoming a humorist.

Only a few hints of the dumb conflict that was passing
in Mark Twain's soul rise to the surface of Mr. Paine 's
pages. We are told scarcely more than that he was
extremely moody. "He was the life of the camp," one
of his comrades recalled, "but sometimes there would
come a reaction and he would hardly speak for a day
or two." Constantly we find him going off "alone
into the wilderness to find his balance and to get away
entirely from humankind." There were other times
when he ' ' talked little or not at all, but sat in one corner
and wrote, wholly oblivious of his surroundings" —
wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would
hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was
writing anything else. All this time, plainly, his crea-
tive instinct was endeavoring to establish itself, with
what mixed motives, however, we can see from the fact
that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen-name

In the Crucible 81

"Josh." "He did not care to sign his own name,"
says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner who was soon to be
a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp-
scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sen-
tence ! — all the contempt and hostility of the pioneers
for literature, all Mark Twain's fear of public opinion,
all the force of his own counter-impulse to succeed on
pioneer terms, to stand in with society, to suppress in
himself a desire that was so unpopular. We can see
these mixed motives in the strange, realistic bravado with
which he said to a man who wanted to start a literary
magazine in Virginia City: "You would succeed if any
one could, but start a flower-garden on the desert of
Sahara, set up hoisting-works on Mount Vesuvius for
mining sulphur, start a literary paper in Virginia City ;
hell!"

Nevertheless, there was in Virginia City a paper with
some literary pretensions called the Enterprise, which
was edited and written by a group of men famous all
over the West for their wit and talent. It was to the
Enterprise that Mark Twain had been sending his writ-
ings, and at last he was offered a position on the staff.
This position he presently accepted. It is significant,
however, that he did so with profound reluctance.

Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark
Twain was a born writer, it is natural to suppose that he
would have welcomed any opportunity to exchange his
uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a life of lit-
erary activities and associations. He would naturally
have gravitated toward such people as the Enterprise
group : that he did so is proved by his constantly court-
ing them as a contributor. But committing himself by
accepting their offer of a position was quite a different
matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky
journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the
rest of the pioneers. "Everybody had money; everybody
wanted to laugh and have a good time, ' ' says Mr. Paine.

82 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

"The Enterprise, 'Comstock to the backbone, ' did what
it could to help things along." Certainly Mark Twain
could not have thought he would be losing caste by con-
necting himself with an institution like that! There,
in short, was his chance at last, as one might suppose;
and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It/ " says
Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author re-
garded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it
straightway. As a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed
a good while over the ' call, ' ' ' and it was only when ' ' the
money situation ' ' had become truly ' ' desperate ' ' and he
had lost all hope of making his way as a miner that he
accepted it. Before binding himself he set off at mid-
night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile walk through
uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilder-
ness/' says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and
we are told that he came out again eight days later with
his mind still undecided. How different that all is from
the mood in which he had entered upon his piloting
career! There had been no hesitation then! He had
walked forward with clear eye and sure foot like a
man registering an inevitable choice of his whole soul.
Now he has to battle with himself and the step he finally
takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a capitulation.
He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City,
a hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the Enterprise
office worn and travel-stained, we are told, on a hot,
dusty August day. "My starboard leg seems to be
unshipped, ' ' he announced at the door. " I 'd like about
one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to
pieces." Then he added: "My name is Clemens, and
I've come to write for the paper." It was, says Mr.
Paine, "the master of the world's widest estate come to
claim his kingdom." Am I mistaken, however, in feel-
ing that there is something painful in that scene, some-
thing shamefaced, something that suggests not an
acclamation but a surrender?

In the Crucible 83

Mr. Paine, indeed, perceives that in joining the staff
of the Enterprise Mark Twain was in some way trans-
gressing his own desire. He attributes this, however, to
another motive than the one that seems to me dominant.
Clemens, he says, displayed "no desperate eagerness to
break into literature, even under those urgent condi-
tions. It meant the surrender of all hope in the mines,
the confession of another failure." No doubt Mark
Twain's masculine pride revolted against that; he had
more or less committed himself to mining, he was turn-
ing his back besides on the line of activity his mother
and his companions approved of; he was relinquishing
the possibility of some sudden, dazzling stroke of for-
tune that might have bought his freedom once for all.
In short, there were plenty of reasons dictated by his
acquisitive instinct for making him reluctant to sur-
render the mining career in which he had proved himself
so inept. But although his acquisitive instinct had been
stimulated to excess, in his heart of hearts he was not
a money-maker but an artist, and the artist in him would
naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this opportunity.
In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we
must consider not only the hopes he was giving up with
his mining career but the character of that opportunity
also. Somehow, in this new call, the creative instinct
in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but
actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly,
did the Enterprise mean for him ? He had been sending
in his compositions; he had been trying his hand, ex-
perimenting, we know, in different styles, and only his
humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque
report of a Fourth of July oration which opened with
the words, "I was sired by the Great American Eagle
and foaled by a continental dam," and it was this that
had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer
Clemens the position. "That," said he, "is the sort of
thing we want." Mark Twain knew this; he knew that,

84 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

although the policy of the Enterprise was one of " abso-
lutely free speech/' he would be expected to cultivate
that one vein alone and that his own craving for wealth
and prestige, the obligation to make money which would
become all the more pressing if he relinquished the
direct acquisitive path of the mining life, would prevent
him from crossing the editor's will or from cultivating
any other vein than that which promised him the great-
est popularity. For him, therefore, the opportunity of
the Enterprise meant an obligation to become virtually
a professional humorist, and this alone. Had he wished
to become a humorist, we are now in a position to see,
he would not have displayed such reluctance in joining
the Enterprise, and the fact that he displayed this
reluctance shows us that in becoming a humorist he felt
that in some way he was selling rather than fulfilling
his own soul.

Why this was so we cannot consider at present: the
time has not yet come to discuss the psychogenesis and
the significance of Mark Twain's humor. But that it
was so we have ample evidence. Mr. Cable tells how,
to his amazement, once, when he and Clemens were giv-
ing a public reading together, the latter, whom he had
supposed happy and satisfied with his triumphant suc-
cess, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and
said with a groan, * ' Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself —
I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly.
I can't endure it any longer." And all the next day,
Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied himself, in spite
of the immense applause that had greeted him, to choos-
ing selections . for his next reading which would be
justified not only as humor but as literature and art.
This is only one of many instances of Mark Twain's
lifelong revolt against a role which he apparently felt
had been thrust upon him. It is enough to corroborate
all our intuitions regarding the reluctance with which
he accepted it.

In the Crucible 85

But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate
these intuitions. Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in
his letters home, "the writer rarely speaks of his work
at all, and is more inclined to tell of the mining shares
he has accumulated," that there is "no mention of his
new title" — the pen-name he had adopted — "and its
success." He knew that his severe Calvinistic mother
could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, worthy or
unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the
money he was making ; he who had sworn never to come
home again until he was a rich man was ashamed in his
mother's eyes to have adopted a career that promised
him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that
of the mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that
success immediately proved to be considerable, and if
he had felt any essential pride in his new work he
would certainly have said something about it. What we
actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome
my repugnance to telling what I am doing or what I
expect to do or propose to do. ' ' That he had no essential
pride in this work, that it was not personal, that he did
not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather
as a commodity we can see from the motives with which
he chose his pen-name : ' ' His letters, copied and quoted
all along the Coast, were unsigned," says Mr. Paine.
"They were easily identified with one another, but not
with a personality. He realized that to build a reputa-
tion it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a
name. He gave the matter a good deal of thought.
He did not consider the use of his own name; the
nom de plume was the fashion of the time. He
wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforget-
table. He tried over a good many combinations in
his mind, but none seemed convincing," etc., etc. In
short, he wanted a trade mark in order to sell what he
instinctively regarded as his merchandise ; and the fact
that the pen-name was the fashion of the time — in

86 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

pioneer circles, especially, observe — simply argues that
all the other writers in the West were in a similar case.
The pen-name was a form of ' ' protective coloration ' ' for
men who could not risk, in their own persons, the odium
of the literary life, and it is an interesting coincidence
that "Mark Twain," in the pilot's vocabulary, implied
"safe water.' ' We shall see later how very significant
this coincidence was in Mark Twain's life: what we
observe now is that he instinctively thought of his
writing as something external to himself, as something
of which he was proud only because it paid.

It is quite plain, then, that far from having found
himself again, as he had once found himself on the
Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone astray. He had
his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was
intermittent ; but whether he was up or whether he was
down he was desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters
and memoranda show all the evidence of a "bad con-
science." Hear him in San Francisco: "We have been
here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings
five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are
now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the
people. . . . But I need change and must move again."
Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may
mean, it is certainly not the sign of a man whose work
absorbs him, whose nature is crystallizing along its
proper lines. "Home again," he notes in his journal,
after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands.
"No — not home again — in prison again, and all the wild
sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped and
so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. God
help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing,
had become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens
once declared he had been so blue at this period," says
Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a loaded pistol to
his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the trig-
ger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother

In the Crucible 87

from New York as he is about to start on the Quaker
City excursion which is to result in "The Innocents
Abroad" and his great fame. There are two letters,
written within the same week of June, 1867 ; the eager-
ness of his youth does not suffice to explain their agita-
tion. In the first he says: "I am wild with impatience
to move — move — move! . . . Curse the endless delays!
They always kill me — they make me neglect every duty
and then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild
beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month."
The second is even more specific: "I am so worthless
that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.
My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward
Orion and toward you all, and an accusing conscience
gives me peace only in excitement and restless moving
from place to place. . . . You observe that under a
cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with
me and gives me freely its contempt.' ' The reason he
assigns for this frame of mind is wholly unacceptable:
far from being guilty of "unworthy conduct" toward
his family, there is every evidence that he had been, as
he remained, the most loyal and bountiful of sons and
guardians. "Under a cheerful exterior I have got a
spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its
contempt. ' ' Could he say more plainly that he has com-
mitted himself to a course of action which has, in some
quite definite way, transgressed his principle of growth ?
One further, final proof. In 1865 "The Jumping
Frog" was published in New York, where, according to
one of the California correspondents, it was "voted the
best thing of the day." How did Clemens, who was still
in the West, receive the news of his success? "The tele-
graph," says Mr. Paine, "did not carry such news in
those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his
victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a lagging
word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought

88 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

disappointment, rather than exaltation, to the author.
Even Artemus Ward's opinion of the story had not
increased Mark Twain's regard for it as literature. That
it had struck the popular note meant, as he believed,
failure for his more highly regarded work. In a letter
written January 20, 1866, he says these things for him-
self: 'I do not know what to write; my life is so
uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and
down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little
worth — save piloting. To think that, after writing many
an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably
good, those New York people should single out a villain-
ous backwoods sketch to compliment me on! — "Jim
Smiley and His Jumping Frog" — a squib which would
never have been written but to please Artemus Ward.' "
He had thought so little of that story indeed that he had
not even offered it to The Calif ornian, the magazine to
which he was a staff contributor : ' ' he did not, ' ' says Mr.
Paine, ' ' regard it highly as literary material. ' ' We can
see in that letter the bitter prompting of his creative
instinct, in rebellion against the course he has drifted
into; we can see how his acquisitive instinct, on the
other hand, forbids him to gainsay the success he has
achieved. "I am in for it," he writes to his brother.
"I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, then
I am done with literature and all other bosh — that is,
literature wherewith to please the general public. I
shall write to please myself then." Marriage, he says
to himself, is going to liberate him, this poor, ingenuous
being! — this divided soul who has never been able to
find any other criterion than that of an environment
which knows no criterion but success. His destiny, mean-
while, has passed out of his own hands: that is the
significance of the "victory" of "The Jumping Frog."
As Mr. Paine says, with terrible, unconscious irony:
"The stone rejected by the builder was made the corner-
stone of his literary edifice."

In the Crucible 89

So much for Mark Twain's motives in becoming a
humorist. He had adopted this role unwillingly, as a
compromise, at the expense of his artistic self-respect,
because it afforded the only available means of satisfying
that other instinct which, in the unconsciousness of his
creative instinct, had become dominant in him, the
gregarious, acquisitive instinct of the success-loving
pioneer. And what a corroboration that instinct now
received! Was ever a choice more thrillingly ratified
by public opinion! "Limelight and the center of the
stage, ' ' says Mr. Paine, ' ' was a passion of Sam Clemens 's
boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly
died. . . . Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and
trappings of leadership. ' ' The permanent dream of his
childhood, indeed, had been to become "something gor-
geous and active, where his word — his nod, even, consti-
tuted sufficient law. ' ' Here we see exhibited what Alfred
Adler calls the "masculine protest,' ' the desire to be
more than manly in order to escape the feeling of in-
security, for Mark Twain, who was a weak child, could
never have survived in the rough-and-tumble of Hanni-
bal life if he had not exerted his imagination and
prevailed over his companions by means other than
physical. This dream had been fulfilled in his piloting
career, which was at once autocratic and spectacular.
United now, a deep craving to shine, with his other
desire to make money, to please his family, to "make
good" in pioneer terms, it received a confirmation so
prodigious that the despised, rejected, repressed, in-
articulate poet in Mark Twain was immediately struck
dumb and his doubts and chagrins and disappointments
were lulled to rest.

Already, in Nevada, Mark Twain had been pointed
out as one of the sights of the territory ; his sayings were
everywhere repeated on the streets. Tom Sawyer was
walking the stage and ' * revelling in his power. ' ' Crashes
of applause greeted his platform sallies ; ' ' the Comstock,

90 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

ready to laugh," says Mr. Paine, "found delight in his
expression and discovered a vast humor in his most
earnest statements"; the opera-houses of the mining-
towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a
seat; "his improved dress and increased prosperity
commanded additional respect." He had "acquired,"
in short, * ' a new and lucrative profession at a bound ' ' ;
and before he went East, and owing to the success of
"The Jumping Frog," "those about him were inclined
to regard him, in some degree at least, as a national
literary figure, and to pay tribute accordingly." When
he set out on the voyage of the Quaker City he found
himself "billed as an attraction" with General Sher-
man and Henry Ward Beecher. But this was only a
faint promise of the glory that was to follow the pub-
lication of "The Innocents Abroad." It was his second
book : his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into
instant and intimate contact with the most distinguished
people in America. Besides this, it brought him the
recognition of The Atlantic Monthly. It brought him
offers of political preferment : a diplomatic position, the
postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of
$10,000 a year, a choice of five influential offices in
California, anything he might be disposed to accept —
"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a Min-
ister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the
President's appointment, senators guarantee the con-
firmation of the Senate. It brought him presently a
tremendous reception from "the brains of London,
assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London
— mine being (between you and me)," he writes to his
publisher, "a name which was received with a flattering
outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list of
guests was called." It brought him an offer from at
least one magazine of ' ' $6,000 cash for twelve articles, of
any length and on any subject." It brought him lecture
-^agements that paid him $1,600 in gold for a single

In the Crucible 91

evening; and so popular were these lectures that when
one night in Pittsburgh he "played" against Fanny
Kemble, the favorite actress of the period, ' ' Miss Kemble
had an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times
the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain." Could
this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career
into which he was drifting, question a verdict like that?
Almost from the outset his filial conscience had been
appeased: of his first lecture tour in Nevada and Cali-
fornia we are told that "it paid him well; he could go
home now, without shame." But even the promptings
of his artistic conscience were now parried and laid at
rest : " he had grown more lenient in his opinion of the
merits of the 'Frog' story itself since it had made
friends in high places, especially since James Russell
Lowell had pronounced it 'the finest piece of humorous
writing yet produced in America.' " Thus whatever
doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored regarding
the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely
overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect
the most.

It was this last fact, without doubt, that sealed his
destiny. James Russell Lowell and "the brains of Lon-
don ' ' ! There was little criticism in their careless judg-
ments, but how was Mark Twain to know that ? He was
a humorist, they accepted him as a humorist; they had
no means of knowing that he was intended to be some-
thing else, that he really wished to be something else.
They found him funny, and he was just as funny as
they found him ; but to Mark Twain their praise meant
more than that; it meant something like a solemn sanc-
tion of his career from the world of culture. "Cer-
tainly," says Mr. Paine, of one of his first triumphal
visits to London, "certainly he was never one to give
himself airs ; but to have the world 's great literary
center paying court to him, who only ten years before
had been penniless and unknown, and who once had

92 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

been a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite
startling.'* Innocent barefoot boy! As if the true
forces of criticism ever operated in the presence of
a visiting foreigner ! Mark Twain had not seen English-
men applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-
table, thrust half a dozen cigars into his mouth at once
and exclaimed : ' ' That 's the way we do it in the States ! ' *
He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to
his oddity, his mere picturesqueness ; he didn't know
that he was being gulled, and partly because he wasn't
— because the beautiful force of his natural personality
would have commanded attention anywhere, because,
also, "the brains of London," the brains of Guildhall
banquets, are not too discriminating when it comes to
" laughter and tears" with slow music, or books like
"The Innocents Abroad." But Mark Twain's was not
the mind to note these subtle shades. What he saw was
that he was being heartily slapped on the back, in no
too obviously patronizing way, by the people who really
knew, whose judgment could really be trusted. Yet
England, as a matter of fact, so far as he was concerned,
was simply countersigning the verdict of America.

For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at
home had been plain men of business, with an eye single
to returns in cash, he might have seen a light and made
a stand against the career of self -exploitation into which
he was drifting. It would not have been easy : from the
moment when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New
York in a roar," business agents and other brokers in
fame and bullion had begun to swarm about this popular
young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship.
But the counsels of some of the most famous and revered
men in America played into the hands of these agents,
and surrendered Mark Twain over to them. Anson
Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward
— these must have been great names to the Nevada
miner of the sixties. One was a diplomat, one a clergy-

In the Crucible 93

man, one a writer ; their national prestige was not based
upon money ; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed
anything less than masters, in some degree, of the life
of the spirit. And all their influence corroborated the
choice Mark Twain had already made.

It was during the " flush times" in Virginia City that
he had met Artemus Ward who, on the pinnacle of his
career, was, for all that little Nevada world, the very
symbol of the literary life itself. " Clemens,' ' we are
told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved
fame, and perhaps with good reason concluded that
Ward 's estimate was correct, that he too could win fame
and honor, once he got a start.' ' We can see what
Ward 's counsel had been : he had accepted Mark Twain,
not as a creative spirit with possibilities of inner growth
before him — what could Artemus Ward have known
about such things? — but as an embryonic institution, so
to speak, asa" going concern, ' ' a man who had already
capitalized himself and wanted only a few practical
hints. Concretely he told him that he ought to * ' extend
his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was sub-
tler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have
great ability," said he; "I believe you have genius.
What you need now is the refinement of association.
Seek companionship among men of superior intellect
and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never
affiliate with inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky
and Dickens and Victor Hugo had been constrained to
accept such advice in their youth, where should we look
now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House"
and "Les Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward
and Anson Burlingame for knowing nothing about the
creative life and its processes; and how can we blame
the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for
not withstanding the prestige of men who, more than
any others he had known, had won their spurs in the
field of the spirit? Even if it had not already been too

94 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

late, there were probably not ten souls in all America
capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child
as to have said to him: "You were right in wishing to
repudiate that line of least resistance. Put money and
fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your mind. Break
your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend — into
life and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed
Ward's injunction and "extended his audience east-
ward" by going East himself. He "never forgot," we
are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed,
he acted upon it immediately by associating himself with
the "choice and refined party" of the Quaker City
excursion which led him to the feet of his future wife.
But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward Beecher,
the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America.
What bread and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly
poet in him? "Now here," said he — Mark Twain re-
ports the interview in one of his letters, "now here, you
are one of the talented men of the age — nobody is going
to deny that — but in matters of business I don 't suppose
you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
I'll tell you what to do and how to do it." And there-
upon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed
him how to make a contract for "The Innocents
Abroad" in which his percentage was a fifth more than
the most opulent publishing house in the country had
ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were
the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from
the wise men of statecraft, literature and divinity.

Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age,
launched, in defiance of that instinct which only for a
few years was to allow him inner peace, upon the vast
welter of a society blind like himself, like him com-
mitted to the pursuit of worldly success.

That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his
independence as a creative spirit we can see from his
general attitude toward his career. He had lapsed for

In the Crucible 95

good and all into a state of what is called moral in-
fantility. We know that the role of laugh-maker had,
from early adolescence, come, as people say, natural to
him. At sixteen, in Hannibal, when he told the story of
Jim Wolfe and the cats, ''his hearers laughed immod-
erately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was
proud and happy in his success.' ' At twenty, at a
printers' banquet in Keokuk, where he made his first
after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his audience,
and raised him many points in the public regard."
After that, he found, he was always the center of attrac-
tion when he spoke in public. It is significant, however,
that from all his triumphs he had returned faithfully to
his work as a printer, just as later he had held so pas-
sionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot.
That persistent adher3nce of his, in a society given over
to exploitation, to a metier in which he could exercise
the instinct of workmanship, of craftsmanship, is the
outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It was
the earnest of the artist in him : his humor was the line
of least resistance. When he adopted humor as a pro-
fession, therefore, he was falling back upon a line he had
previously rejected, and this implied that he had ceased
to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the
artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had
become a journalist, and his career was now at the
mercy of circumstance.

Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The
Innocents Abroad, ' ' he wrote to his publisher : " I have
other propositions for a book, but have doubted the
propriety of interfering with good newspaper engage-
ments, except my way as an author could be demon-
strated to be plain before me." To which Mr. Paine
adds, specifically: '*In spite of the immense success of
his book — a success the like of which had scarcely been
known in America — Mark Twain held himself to be, not
a literary man, but a journalist. He had no plans for

96 (The Ordeal of Mark Twain

another book; as a newspaper owner and editor he ex-
pected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the
rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of
mind of the writer with a living sense of his vocation!
And this expressed an attitude that Mark Twain never
outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of
Clemens 's fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to
have been at their highest point: "As Mark Twain in
the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put
aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now
again literature had dropped into the background, had
become an avocation, while financial interests pre-
vailed.' p Financial interests! — there were whole years
during which he thought of hardly anything else.

This conception of his literary career as interchange-
able, so to say, with his financial career is borne out by
his thoroughly journalistic attitude toward his work.
Thus we find him at the outset proposing to "follow
up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster
with a series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and
then to "take advantage of the popularity of the
Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the samr — *•
ject. ' ' While he was writing * ' Roughing It " he planned
a book of adventures in the diamond mines of South
Africa, and so impersonal was this work that he pro-
posed that the material for it should be gathered by an
agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr.
Paine, "the success of * Roughing It' naturally made
him cast about for other autobiographical material."
Years later, after the failure of the Paige machine, in
which he had invested all his money, we find him return-
ing to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly
as if his literary life were indeed a business enterprise.
"I confined myself to the boy-life out on the Missis-
sippi," he writes, "because that had a peculiar charm
for me, and not because I was not familiar with other
phases of life. ' ' And then he enumerates all the various

In the Crucible 97

roles he has played, concluding that "as the most valu-
able capital or culture or education usable in the build-
ing of novels is personal experience I ought to be well-
equipped for that trade. ' ' It does not concern him that
under all these different costumes of the miner, the
prospector, the reporter, the publisher, he has been the
same man, that he has really experienced not life but
only modes of living: the costumes are all different,
and each one is good for a new performance. It is not
the artist but the salesman that speaks here, the sales-
man with an infallible finger for the public pulse. No
more lectures in churches, he tells his agent Redpath:
"People are afraid to laugh in a church" ; and again, to
his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wil-
son": "There was nothing new in that story" — "The
American Claimant" — "but the finger-prints in this one
is virgin ground — absolutely fresh, and mighty curious
and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who
prophesied a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's
"Memoirs" and then proceeded to sell almost exactly
that number, knew very well what the public wanted:
that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connec-
tion with what he was planning to do, he used the word
"possibilities" — the possibilities of this, the possibilities
of that — in the commercial, not in the artistic, sense;
he appears always to have been occupied with the prom-
ise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him,
never with its elements of artistic interest and value.
That authorship was to him, in fact, not an art but a
trade, and only the chief trade of a series that he had
followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it
not as a means of free individual expression but as
something naturally conditioned by the laws of supply
and demand, all the evidence of his life goes to show.
I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot and
his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a man-
acled servant of the public": "we write frankly and

98 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

fearlessly/ ' he adds, naively, "but then we 'modify*
before we print." One might imagine that such a thing
as an artist had never existed.

Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867,
to the moment of Mark Twain's Cooper Union lecture,
when he finds himself, in the hands of his agent Fuller,
advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving
Hall, Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese
jugglers.' ' Mark Twain hesitates. Fuller is obdurate.
"What we want this time," he says, "is reputation any-
way— money is secondary. M So he floods the house with
complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city.
"Mark," he says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's
all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will. The
fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just
out you are going to be the most talked of man in the
country." It was true. But in that moment — that
typical moment, in that reluctance, in that acquiescence,
in that corroboration, Mark Twain's die had been cast.
. . . Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with
generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark
Twain who is going to walk the boards of the Gilded
Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes to his
mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I
have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me
freely its contempt"; it is a formidable spirit, that alter
ego within him, — he is going to hear its bitter prompt-
ings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its
voice : his private, personal and domestic interests have
wholly supplanted the dim and wavering sense of his
vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned over two
things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money
and he wished to secure a government appointment for
Orion."

Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determin-
ism, of the inexorable sequence of cause and effect. As
Mr. Paine says — with an emphasis of his own — he had

In the Crucible 99

but to review his own life for justification of his belief.
From this point on, his career was a steady process of
what is called adaptation to environment. He had ab-
dicated that spiritual independence without which the
creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself"
now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses
of adjustments."

CHAPTER V

THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY

"Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as
bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride. "

Ibsen: The Comedy of Love.

THE Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wil-
son," as I have recalled, consisted of two members,
Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead himself.
" Judge Driscoll," says our author, "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." As for Pudd'nhead, with
his crazy calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway;
no one cared a straw what Pudd'nhead believed. It
was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, of
Tocqueville 's comment : ' ' I know of no country in which
there is so little independence of mind and real free-
dom of discussion as in America." Mark Twain has
corroborated this, in so many words, himself: "in our
country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably
precious things : freedom of thought, freedom of speech,
and the prudence never to practise either." An
American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon
one of two conditions only: either he must be willing
to stay at the bottom of the ladder of success or he must
be able to climb to the top. No one cares to impugn
a fool ; no one dares to impugn a captain of industry.

Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence
as a creative spirit, he put his foot on the first rung

ioo

The Candidate for Gentility 101

of that ladder. The children of light are all Pudd'n-
heads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if
Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the
ranks of the children of light he would have been per-
fectly free — to starve and to shine. But once he had
made his bid for success, he had to accept its moral
consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of
the ladder he could hope to regain only at the top.
Meanwhile he had to play the recognized American
game according to the recognized American rules.

Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential
instinct, the instinct of the artist, had been thwarted
and repressed. Nevertheless, just because he was es-
sentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks
of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him
at first that people laughed at his stories and gave him
gold and silver for telling them! His acquisitive in-
stinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the lapse of
his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a
personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity
and his environment which had sprung up in a spirit
that had been swept clear for it; it was wholly unable
to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the most inept
of business men, without practical judgment, without
foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was
1 ' never, " says Mr. Howells, "a man who cared any-
thing about money except as a dream, and he wanted
more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this
dream." Yes, to fill out the spaces the prodigious fail-
ure of his genius had left vacant ! To win fame and
fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished him to
do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost
every one he met knew more about the art of success
than he did. He had to "make good," but in order to
do so he had to subject himself to those who knew the
ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in
manners, in prestige, stood to him in loco parentis; and.

102 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

to complete the ironic circle, he was endlessly grateful
to those who led him about, like a Savoyard bear, be-
cause he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them
he owed the success he had attained. This is the real
meaning of Mr. Paine 's remark: ''It was always Mark
Twain's habit to rely on somebody."

The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and
varied one. In later years, "he did not always consult
his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we are told, "any
more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser
Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he
intended to commit heresies in their respective prov-
inces." But these were the exceptions that proved
the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to
the will and word of those who had won his allegiance.
There was Artemus Ward, there was Anson Burling-
ame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what they told
him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There
was Bret Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained
and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an
awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer
of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain
favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest
people in the land." Above all, and among many
others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first mo-
ment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in
all literary affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in mat-
ters pertaining to literature and to literary people in
general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells
from that day." It was to Howells that he said,
apropos of "The Innocents Abroad": "When I read
that review of yours I felt like the woman who was so
glad her baby had come white." It has become the
custom with a certain school of critics to assert that
Mark Twain's spiritual rights were in some way in-
fringed by his associates and especially by his wife, the
evident fact being that he craved authority with all the

The Candidate for Gentility 103

self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned
safely to go his own way and feels himself surrounded
by pitfalls. " There has always been somebody in
authority over my manuscript and privileged to im-
prove it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry
chagrin, to Mr. S. S. McClure. But the privilege had
always emanated from Mark Twain himself.

In short, having lost the thread of his life and com-
mitted himself to the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain
had to adapt himself to the prevailing point of view of
American society. "The middle class," says a contem-
porary English writer, Mr. R. H. Gretton, "is that por-
tion of the community to which money is the primary
condition and the primary instrument of life " ; if that
is true, we can understand why Matthew Arnold ob-
served that the whole American population of his time
belonged to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark
Twain accepted the spiritual rule of the majority, he
found himself leading, to use an expression of bridge-
players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a young
writer capable of great artistic achievements that he
was valued now, but as a promising money-maker
capable of becoming a plutocrat. And meanwhile, in-
stead of being an interesting individual, he was a social
inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his
outlandish manners and appearance, his very pictur-
esqueness — everything that made foreigners delight in
him, all these raw materials of personality that would
have fallen into their natural place if he had been able
to consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones
about the neck of a young man whose salvation de-
pended upon his winning the approval of bourgeois
society. His l * outrageousness, " as Mr. Howells calls
it, had ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformu-
lated force ; it had become a disadvantage, a disability,
a mere outrageousness ! That gift of humor was a gold-
mine— so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evi-

104 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

dently cut out for success. But he had a lot of things
to live down first! He was, in a word, a "roughneck"
from the West, on probation; and if he wanted to get
on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We can-
not properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's
marriage unless we realize that he had been manceuvered
into the role of a candidate for gentility.

But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to
go back. What had been Mark Twain's original, un-
conscious motive in surrendering his creative life? To
fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead
father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order
to please his mother. In short, when the artist in him
had abdicated, the family man, in whom personal and
domestic interests and relations and loyalties take pre-
cedence of all others, had come to the front. His home
had ever been the hub of Mark Twain 's universe : ' ' deep
down," says Mr. Paine, of the days of his first triumphs
in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he was al-
ways so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-
two, able to go back to his mother "without shame,"
having at last retrieved his failure as a miner, he had
renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained
precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-
four at this time, we are told, "but as keen and vigorous
as ever — proud (even if somewhat critical) of this
handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who
had been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted
him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired search-
ingly into his morals and habits. In turn, he petted,
comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the
same Sam, and always would be — a true prophecy. ' ' It
was indeed so true that Mark Twain, who required
authority as much as he required affection, could not
fail now to seek in the other sex some one who would
take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he
had to be mothered by somebody, and he transferred

The Candidate for Gentility 105

this filial relation to at least one other person before it
found its bourn first in his wife and afterward in hia
daughters. This was " Mother' ' Fairbanks of the
Quaker City party, who had, we are told, so large
an influence on the tone and character of those travel
letters which established his fame. ' ' She sewed my but-
tons on," he wrote — he was thirty-two at the time —
"kept my clothing in presentable form, fed me on
Egyptian jam (when I behaved), lectured me awfully
. . . and cured me of several bad habits.' ' It was only
natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule
of his wife ' ' implicitly, ' ' that he should have ' ' gloried, ' '
as Mr. Howells says, in his subjection to her. "After
my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, "she
edited everything I wrote. And what is more — she not
only edited my works — she edited me ! ' ' What, indeed,
were Mark Twain's works in the totality of that rela-
tionship? What, for that matter, was Olivia Clemens?
She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After
her death Mark Twain was always deploring the respon-
sibility he had been to her. Does he not fall into the
actual phrase his mother had used about him? — "she
always said I was the most difficult child she had. ' ' She
was, I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for
just as she had taken the place of his mother, so at her
death her daughters took her place. Mr. Paine tells
how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara
Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign
on the billiard-room door : " No billiards after 10 P. M. ' '
— a sign that was always outlawed. "He was a boy,"
Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been called away,
left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He
used to complain humorously how his daughters were
always trying to keep him straight — "dusting papa
off," as they called it, and how, wherever he went, little
notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I
have been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my

106 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

life." And by virtue of this lovable weakness, too, he
was the typical American male.

As we can see now, it was affection rather than ma-
terial self-interest that was leading Mark Twain on-
ward and upward. It had always been affection! He
had never at bottom wanted to ''make good" for any
other reason than to please his mother, and in order to
get on he had had to adopt his mother 's values of life ;
he had had to repress the deepest instinct in him and
accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of
success. As the ward of his mother, he had never con-
sciously broken with the traditions of Western society.
Now, a candidate for gentility on terms wholly foreign
to his nature, he found the filial bond of old renewed
with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had
to "make good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far
more complicated obligation. As we shall see, Mark
Twain rebelled against her will, just as he had rebelled
against his mother's, yet could not seriously or finally
question anything she thought or did. "He adored her
as little less than a saint," we are told: which is only
another way of saying that, automatically, her gods had
become his.

It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss
the relations between authors and their wives: so in-
tensely personal is the atmosphere of our society that to
"stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even of
those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civili-
zation is regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the
way in which English criticism has thrashed out the
pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Percy and
Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the
Bronte family and the Lambs and the Eossettis! Is it
to satisfy the neighborly village ear or even a mere nor-
mal concern with interesting relationships? At bottom
English critics are so copious and so candid in these
domestic analyses because they believe that what great

The Candidate for Gentility 107

writers think and feel is of profound importance to so-
ciety and because they know that what any man thinks
and feels is largely determined by personal circum-
stances and affections. It is, no doubt, because of this
frank, free habit of mind that all the best biographies
even of our American worthies — Hamilton, Franklin
and Lincoln, for instance — have been written by Eng-
lishmen! No one will deny, I suppose, that Mark
Twain 's influence upon our society has been, either in a
positive or in a negative way, profound. "When, there-
fore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not
only edited his works but edited him, we feel slightly
annoyed with Mr. Howells who, whenever he speaks of
Mrs. Clemens, abandons his role as a realist and care-
fully conceals that puissant personage under the veil
of "her heavenly whiteness. " We feel that the friend,
the neighbor, the guest has prevailed in Mr. Howells Js
mind over the artist and the thinker and that he is far
more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations
and his private loyalties than the proper public task of
a psychologist and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we
know that neither the wives of European authors nor,
for that matter, the holy women of the New Testament
have suffered any real degradation from being scru-
tinized as creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops
and botanizes upon Mrs. Clemens it is because, when
her standards became those of her husband, she stepped
immediately into a role far more truly influential than
that of any President.

Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-
dealer and mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Per-
haps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in any case, you can
imagine it? Those " up-State" towns have a civiliza-
tion all their own : without the traditions of moral free-
dom and intellectual culture which New England has
never quite lost, they had been so salted down with the
spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had at-

io8 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

tained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social
stratification as absolute as that of New England itself.
A stagnant, fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-
eighths or two and a quarter generations deep, densely
provincial, resting on a basis of angular sectarianism,
eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, im-
posing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing
all to submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know
those august brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the
Middle States, those fountains on the front lawn that
have never played, those bronze animals with their per-
manent but economical suggestions of the baronial park?
The quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of
terrifying effect based upon a minimum of psychic ex-
penditure! They are the Vaticans of the coal-popes of
yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice pro-
claimed them sacrosanct.

We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been
struck dumb in such a presence. "Elmira," says Mr.
Paine, "was a conservative place — a place of pedigree
and family tradition ; that a stranger, a former printer,
pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to
carry off the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthi-
est families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted. The
fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count
against other considerations. The social protest
amounted almost to insurrection.' ' One remembers the
story of Thomas Carlyle, that Scottish stone-mason's
son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of Dum-
fries. One conceives what Carlyle 's position would have
been if he had not found his own soul before he fell in
love, and if Jane Welsh had been merely the passive
reflection of a society utterly without respect for the life
of the spirit. He would have been, and would have
felt himself, the interloper then — he would not have
been Carlyle but the stone-mason's son, and she would
have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark Twain had

The Candidate for Gentility 109

not married an awakened soul; he had married a
young girl without experience, without imagination,
who had never questioned anything, understood any-
thing, desired anything, who had never been conscious
of any will apart from that of her parents, her rela-
tives, her friends. To win her approval and her pride,
therefore — and love compelled him to do that — he
had to win the approval and the pride of Elmira
itself, he had to win the imprimatur of all that vast
and intricate system of privilege and convention of
which Elmira was the symbol. They had all said of
Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," that "no
one was good enough for her — certainly not this adven-
turous soldier of letters from the West." Charles
Langdon, her brother and Mark Twain's old comrade,
was so mortified at having brought this ignominy upon
his own household, that he set off on a voyage round
the world in order to escape the wedding. Further-
more, Mark Twain 's friends in California replied unani-
mously to Mr. Langdon 's enquiries about his character,
that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would
make the "worst husband on record." Would not all
these things have put any lover on his mettle?

Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional
acceptability in this new situation was due not to his
genius but to the fact that he was able to make money
by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his
candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr.
Paine 's record, the vast success Mark Twain was hav-
ing as a humorous journalist and lecturer. With the
publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know,
"he had become suddenly a person of substance — an
associate of men of consequence": even in New York
people pointed him out in the street. He was a lion, a
conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to
that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for
any family to refuse relationship with one whose star was

no The Ordeal of Mark Twain

so clearly ascending. ' ' But could he, would he, keep it
up? To be sure, he considered himself, we are specifi-
cally told, not as a literary man but as a journalist ; his
financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going
to touch a book," he wrote, ''unless there was money
in it, and a good deal of it"; he had already formed
those habits of " pecuniary emulation" and "conspicu-
ous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and
which were almost a guarantee that he would take a
common-sense view of his talent and turn it to the best
financial account; three months before his marriage,
this erstwhile barefoot boy was already — the best pos-
sible omen for one with his resources — $22,000 in debt!
He had put his shoulder to the wheel and had proved
that he was able to make money even faster than he
spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so
manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other
things being equal — and his wife would see to that — ■
he really was a safe, conservative risk as a wealthy coal-
dealer 's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon capitulated: he
was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain,
anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could
be trusted to cherish his daughter in the style, as people
say, to which she had been accustomed. His own house-
hold expenses were $40,000 a year: of course they
couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected,
and besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he
was going to start them off, and he was going to do it
handsomely. One remembers how, in "The Gilded Age,"
when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal
that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person
of consideration, whose speech was freighted with mean-
ing, whose looks were all significant. The words of a
proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author adds,
naively, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings
are repeated as if they were solid wisdom." Mark
Twain must have had Jervis Langdon in his mind when

The Candidate for Gentility III

he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally
stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously
arrived, and now that this man had become his own
bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his gratitude,
sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot
forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house
in a fashionable street in Buffalo, a house newly and
fully fitted up, with a carriage and a coachman and
all the other appointments of a prosperous menage. It
was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark
Twain's wedding day! — he woke up, so to speak, and
found himself, with the confused and intoxicating sen-
sations of a bridegroom, absolutely committed to a scale
of living such as no mere literary man at the outset of
his career could ever have lived up to. He had been
fairly shanghaied into the business man's paradise!
But Jervis Langdon had foreseen everything. Mark
Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, "lay in the
direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper
enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a
home." That was the ambition, already evoked, which
his new situation confirmed, the ambition which had
now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged
it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his
father-in-law bound himself to the extent of $25,000
and advanced half of it in cash so that Mark Twain
could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express.
Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually be-
come a business man, with love and honor obliging, him
to remain one.

The full consequences of this moral surrender — shall
we call it? — can only appear as we go on with our
story. Meanwhile, we may note that, precisely because
of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently
and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been
able to do so he might, in a few years, have bought his
liberty; but he lost interest in his journalistic enter-

112 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

prise just as he was to lose interest in so many other
lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he
was driven back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a
perfect horror and heart-sickness over it," Mrs.
Clemens wrote to her sister after the bankruptcy of the
publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I
cannot get away from the feeling that business failure
means disgrace. I suppose it always will mean that
to me. Sue, if you were to see me you would see that
I have grown old very fast during this last year : I have
wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry.
Everything seems to me so impossible. ' ' Naturally, in-
evitably ; but imagine an author, who was also a devoted
lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His
bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of
joyous freedom. "Farewell — a long farewell — to busi-
ness!" he exclaimed during those weeks of what might
have seemed an impending doom. "I will never touch
it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it,
revel in it; I will swim in ink!" But when his release
finally comes he writes as follows to his wife, whom he
has left in France: "Now and then a good and dear
Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and
says, * Cheer up — don't be downhearted ' . . . and none
of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me
and how blithe I am inside. Except when I think of
you, dear heart — then I am not blithe ; for I seem to see
you grieving and ashamed, and dreading to look people
in the face. . . . You only seem to see rout, retreat, and
dishonored colors dragging in the dirt — whereas none
of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but
no dishonor — and we will march again. Charley War-
ner said to-day, 'Sho, Livy isn't worrying. So long as
she's got you and the children she doesn't care what
happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't
convince me!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from
being the votary of genius, was not quite the votary of

The Candidate for Gentility 113

love either ; she was, before all, the unquestioning daugh-
ter of that " wealthy coal-dealer ' ' of Elmira, who had
"held about a quarter of a million in her own right";
her husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but
when he fell behind in the race of pecuniary emula-
tion she could not help applying the spur. She had
even invested her own patrimony in her husband 's ven-
tures, and all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had
spared went up the chimney in the failure of Charles
L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to re-
trieve that ! And so it went : as the years passed, owing
to the very ineptitude that ought to have kept him out
of business altogether, he was involved more and more
deeply in it.

As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's
survival, on probation as he was and morally pledged
to make a large income, was that he should adopt the
whole code of his new environment. It was for love's
sake that he had put his head, so to say, into the noose ;
in his case the matrimonial vow had been almost lite-
rally reversed and it was he who had promised not only
to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was
laid under further obligations by certain family disas-
ters that followed his marriage and by the weakness of
his wife. A neurotic, hysterical type — at sixteen,
through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete
invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened
room, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie
in any position except upon her back till a wizard came
one day and told her, with miraculous results, to arise
and walk — Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly
fragility, and she seems to have remained so during
the greater part of her life. "I am still nursing Livy
night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark Twain
writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of
their first child, not long after, naturally intensified his
almost abnormal absorption in domestic interests, his

H4 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

already excessive devotion to his wife. We recall that
passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I am
in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I
marry, then I am done with literature and all other
bosh — that is, literature wherewith to please the general
public. I shall write to please myself then." What
chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven
to support the pretentious establishment his father-in-
law had wished on him, to find his own bearings and
write to please that "self" which had never possessed
any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this
new life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel
that no loyalties are valid which conflict with domestic
loyalties, that no activities are admirable which do not
immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that private
and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the
prime interests of man.

" Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after
his wife's death, is said to figure their relationship:
Adam there is the hewer of wood and the drawer of
water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all mat-
ters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty
of this Beast. "Some instinct tells me that eternal
vigilance is the price of supremacy." And how Mrs.
Clemens exercised it! There is something for the gods
to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about
by a little child who, in the profound somnolence of
her spirit, was merely going through the motions of an
inherited domestic piety. "Her life had been circum-
scribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple
sort"; but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work
of polishing and purifying her life companion. She had
no wish to destroy his personality, to make him over,
but only to preserve his best, and she set about it in
the right way — gently, and with a tender gratitude in
each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed
his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had

The Candidate for Gentility 115

been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude
toward life — to her always so serious and sacred; she
suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on
matters of religion." That was before they were mar-
ried: afterward, " concerning his religious observances
her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens
had not at that time formulated any particular doc-
trines of his own. ... It took very little persuasion on
his wife's part to establish family prayers in their
home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a
Bible chapter." Thus was reestablished over him that
old Calvinistic spell of his mother's, against which he
had so vainly revolted as a child: preserving his "best,"
as we can see, meant preserving what fitted into the
scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious
man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons
of this world, for Olivia Clemens had never known any
other sort of hero. "In time," says Mr. Paine, with a
terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly with
his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived
more with the world, had become more familiar with its
larger needs, and the proportions of created things." It'
was too late then; the mischief had long been done.
Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and
she prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance
upon that weakness to which he, the chivalrous South-
erner— the born cavalier, in reality — could not fail to
respond. Why did she habitually call him "Youth"?
Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay
in keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal atti-
tude which he could never resist? He had indeed
found a second mother now, and he "not only accepted
her rule implicitly," as Mr. Ho wells says, "but he re-
joiced, he gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally
enjoyed "shivering" her "exquisite sense of decorum";
but he, who could not trust his own judgment and to
whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as an-

Ii6 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

other, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course.
"I would quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought
them immoral."

It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the
blind leading the blind. Mark Twain had thrown him-
self into the hands of his wife ; she, in turn, was merely
the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive
about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It dis-
tressed her to see me do heedless things which could
bring me under criticism. ' ' That was partly, of course,
because she wished him to succeed for his own sake,
but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We
can see, between the lines of Mr. Paine 's record, not
only what a shy little provincial body she was, how
easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in their
journey ings about the world, but how far from unambi-
tious she was also. It was for her own sake, there-
fore, that she trimmed him and tried to turn Caliban
into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, hav-
ing annexed him to herself she had to make him as pre-
sentable as possible in order to satisfy her own vanity
before the eyes of those upon whose approval her hap-
piness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture
of embarrassment with which she had had to confess at
a London dinner-table that he, the great American
author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, "and the
others. ' ' But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira,
was almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs.
Clemens were often the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells.
Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells after one
of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells
bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good
deal better than we get at home.' I 'caught it' for
interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing her
the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her
that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught
it* once more for personating that drunken Colonel

The Candidate for Gentility 117

James. I 'caught it* for mentioning that Mr. Longfel-
low's picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a
lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had
privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames,
and that if you wouldn 't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton,
etc., etc., etc., the madam was simply speechless for the
space of a minute. Then she said: 'How could you,
Youth ! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sen-
sitive nature,' " etc. She was on pins and needles, we
see, and it must have been intolerable to her that, at the
Atlantic dinners, her husband, in spite of his im-
mense fame, sat below the salt : her whole innocent mood
was that of a woman to whom the values of that good
society which, as Goethe said, offers no material for
poetry, are the supreme, unquestionable values and who
felt that she and her brood must at all hazards learn the
ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his
Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells : "My
sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that
it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a
list of humiliations that extends back to when I was
seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me re-
gardless of my repentances." Imagine a European
man of genius having to qualify, not as an individual,
but as a member of a social order into which he had
not been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to
society because it tolerated the man who had once been
a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, as Mr. Paine pre-
sents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods.
Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark
Twain's character can we understand his literary sub-
jugation. From the moment of his marriage his artistic
integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter of
fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a
man of letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and
faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. He had ac-
cepted his father-in-law's financial assistance; he had

n8 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

bought his post on the Buffalo Express; in return, he
had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In
these words of his Salutatory he made his pledge public :
" Being a stranger it would be immodest for me to sud-
denly and violently assume the associate editorship of
the Buffalo Express without a single word of comfort
or encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this
paper, who are about to be exposed to constant attacks
of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be as
brief as possible. I only want to assure parties having
a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that
I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and in-
tentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce
any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make
trouble. . . . Such is my platform. I do not see any
use in it, but custom is law and must be obeyed. "
Never, surely, was a creative will more innocently, more
painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage
had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the
final whiff of chloroform sealing a slumber that many
a previous whiff had already induced. With that prom-
ise to be "good," to refrain from hurting "parties
having a friendly interest in the prosperity ' ' of his
journal, the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a
final trance: anybody could manipulate him now. We
have seen that his wife, who had become his chief cen-
sor, having no more independence of judgment than he,
simply exposed him to the control of public opinion.
This, in all matters of culture, meant New England, and
especially Boston, and accordingly to please Boston —
impossible, terrifying task! — had become as obligatory
upon Mark Twain as to please Elmira.

We have already observed the intellectual posture of
Boston during the Gilded Age. Frigid and emascu-
late, it cast upon the presuming outsider the cold and
hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared
to stand any nonsense. ' * To-morrow night, ' ' writes Mark

The Candidate for Gentility 119

Twain, in one of his earlier letters, "I appear for the
first time before a Boston audience — 4,000 critics"; he
was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and he tells
how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. For-
tunately, in a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr.
Howells, a charitable sponsor, a charitable interme-
diary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells
was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells
was almost as much the nervous and timid alien in Bos-
ton society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the latter 's natural
ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her
husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he
simply redoubled them. Together, like two tremulous
maids dressing the plebeian daughter of some newly-
rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for
a court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him,
trimmed him — to his own everlasting gratitude. To
Mr. Howells he wrote : ' ' I owe as much to your training
as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss
who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way
to handle his art"; and of his wife he said: "I was a
mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy
took charge of me . . . and I may still be to the rest of
the world, but not to her. She has made a very credit-
able job of me." And no doubt that refining process
was necessary. If Mark Twain had been enabled to
stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover him-
self as an artist, it would have resulted naturally from
the growth of his own self-consciousness, his own criti-
cal sense. As it was, undertaken in behalf of a wholly
false, external ideal and by people who had no compre-
hension of his true principle of growth, people who were
themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed
the last vestiges of his moral independence. There is
a sorry tale about Mark Twain's neckties that is really
symbolic of the process he was going through. It seems
that long after his marriage he still continued to wear

120 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

an old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause
of great embarrassment to his family and his friends,
an ever-present reminder that his regeneration was still
incomplete. No one quite knew what to do about it till
at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two
cravats and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort,
into wearing them. In this way the mysteries of a pro-
vincial gentility — provincial because it was without a
sense of proportion — were kept constantly before his
mind and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulli-
ver among the Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surren-
dered his limbs to the myriad threads of convention,
yielded his locks to the shears of that simple Delilah
his wife.

For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had
to satisfy? Hardly a taste for the frank, the free, the
animated, the expressive! The criticism he received
was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens
and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appre-
ciation/' that they formed a circle of "devout listeners"
when Mark Twain himself used to read Browning
aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expres-
sion of life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens 's circle
of ideas ; she could not breathe in that atmosphere with
any comfort ; her instinctive notion of literature was of
something that is read at the fireside, out loud, under
the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with
the Bible and a father tempering the wind of King
James 's English to the sensitive ears and blushing cheek
of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, was
quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the
blindfold novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is
'good.' Pretty strong language for her," writes Mark
Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at
work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and
the Pauper, ' ' she so greatly preferred the latter that
Mark Twain really felt it was rather discreditable of

The Candidate for Gentility 121

him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at
all. "Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have
even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this yarn for youth.
My stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint
praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way.
She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill
doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. This is no mean
triumph, my dear sir." And shortly afterward he
wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by the
verbal agreement they are both going into the same
book; but Livy says they're not, and by George I she
ought to know. She says they're going into separate
books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly
gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the pub-
lisher's profits and mine, too." It was "The Prince
and the Pauper," a book that anybody might have writ-
ten but whose romantic medievalism was equally re-
spectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal,
that Mrs. Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds
Mr. Paine, "appears to have been especially concerned
about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." Plainly
it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's
natural genius received from these relentless critics
to whom he stood in such subjection, to whom he offered
such devotion ; for Mr. Howells, too, if we are to accept
Mr. Paine 's record, seconded him as often as not in
these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the
production of "blindfold novelettes" and plays of an
abysmal foolishness. As for Mark Twain's unique mas-
terpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only tolerably
well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may pos-
sibly pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to
which Mr. Paine adds: "It did not fascinate him as
did the story of the wandering prince. He persevered
only as the story moved him. . . . Apparently, he had
not yet acquired confidence or pride enough in poor
Huck to exhibit him, even to friends." And quite nat-

122 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

urally! His artistic self-respect had been so little de-
veloped, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all
this mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride
in a book which was, precisely, the mirror of the unre-
generate past he was doing his best to live down.

Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the role of critic and
censor. A memorandum Mark Twain made at the
time when he and she were going over the proofs of
"Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived
of her task. It is in the form of a dialogue between
them:

Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word
would be better than "stench. " You have used that pretty
often.

But can't I get it in anywhere? Youfve knocked it out every
time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, good
word.

Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a
slave boy.

It's out, and my father is whitewashed.

Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change ' ' breech-clout. ' '
It's a word that you love and I abominate. I would take that
and "offal" out of the language.

You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy.

We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was
just as offensive as profanity, that she had no sense of
the difference between virility and profanity and vul-
garity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, no in-
dependence of judgment at all. We can see also that
she had no artistic ideal for her husband, that she re-
garded his natural liking for bold and masculine lan-
guage, which was one of the outward signs of his latent
greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad man-
ners, as something that endangered their common pres-
tige in the eyes of conventional public opinion. She
condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, specifically,
"for the offense they might give in one way or an-

The Candidate for Gentility 123

other"; and that her sole object, however unconscious,
in doing this was to further him, not as an artist but
as a popular success, and especially as a candidate for
gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, as
we observe in the incident of his father and the slave
boy, whitewash not only himself but his family history
also. And in all this Mr. Howells seconded her. "It
skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to
indulge in, ' ' he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his
letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an
instant," the "swearing" in this case being what he
himself admits is "so exactly the thing Huck would
say" — namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for
Mark Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb.
Mr. Paine tells of a certain story he had written that
was disrespectful to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it
into German, with some idea of publishing it surrep-
titiously ; but his conscience had been too much for him.
He had confessed, and even the German version had
been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr.
Howells 's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckle-
berry Finn"? "Mrs. Clemens received the mail this
morning," he writes, "and the next minute she lit into
the study with danger in her eye and this demand on
her tongue, ' Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaka
of?' Then I had to miserably confess that I had left
it out when reading the MS. to her. Nothing but almost
inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my scalp.
Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a
little one-sided?"

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 mas-

124 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

ters 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 master-
pieces yourself, you might at least consider the feel-
ings of others'; and Miss Jewett, regarding him se-
verely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now
you've been spoke to!' " Very humiliating, very igno-
minious, 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 ambi-
tion to succeed in a practical sense, to win wealth and
fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seek-
ing, 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 asso-
ciated 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 lit-
erary 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 great-
est, he had met the man whom the Brahmins them-
selves 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 en-
countered 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

The Candidate for Gentility 125

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 popu-
lar 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 corrobora-
tion. 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 re-
ligious 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 func-
tion of literature that Mark Twain had found in
America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "be-
lieve in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no mat-

126 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

ter." 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 lit-
erary life as it shaped itself in industrial America every
incentive to cower and cringe and hedge, and no incen-
tive whatever to stand upright as a man — is it remark-
able, 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 look-
ing. 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 stand-
ards of his own and living up to them ?

"A man is never anything but what his outside influ-
ences 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

The Candidate for Gentility 127

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 blas-
phemous,' ' who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of
himself in public to the end of his life as a Presby-
terian, who had, in fact, like the chameleon which he
said man was, taken the religious color of his environ-
ment, 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 rab-
bits, 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 oc-
curred to him to resolve to become brave. He could not
originate the idea — it had to come to him from the
outside."

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 ?

CHAPTER VI

everybody's neighbor

"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 consider-
ation 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! Forgot-
ten, deeply buried, is the " queer, fanciful, uncommuni-
cative 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, "thor-
oughly 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 en-
vironment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a

128

Everybody's Neighbor 129

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, "com-
posed the substance ' ' of Mark Hanna 's life ; * ' his dispo-
sition 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 metamor-
phosis 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, unem-
ployed 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 fire-
side." 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

130 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

house was not unsentient matter — it had a heart and
a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solici-
tudes 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 ac-
cepted the role 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 chal-
lenge: 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 con-
sumption 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 apprehen-
sion," 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 some-

Everybody's Neighbor 131

thing 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 hun-
dreds 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, ac-
cording 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 ser-
vants, ample as to number. ' ' Certainly his natural
taste, which was always, we are told, for a sraple, in-
expensive 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 "dis-
position towards an expansive, all-round life," a dis-
position 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 were always guests;
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 ac-
commodation 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 sum-
mer 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

132 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 be-
come Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the begin-
ning 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 outs+anding 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 turn-
ing 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 pro-
mote under his own name. He had, moreover, an un-
failing interest in the mechanical devices of other peo-
ple. 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

Everybody's Neighbor 133

"Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in this
way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Missis-
sippi"— 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 dic-
tation 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 specu-
lation to which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark
Twain was drawn like steel to the magnet. He in-
vested, 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 re-
dress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Aus-
trian 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

134 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 ven-
tures 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"; calculat-
ing that the American business alone of the Paige Type-
setting 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 in-
vention, 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 agita-
tion and irritation, "excited, worried, impatient, rash,
frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against

Everybody's Neighbor 135

the grain; no matter, he is living the true American
life, living it with a mad fervor. He cannot even pub-
lish a book in the ordinary way, he has to make a for-
tune out of every one : ll 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 sub-
scription] 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

136 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

Mark Twain was almost consciously bidding for ap-
proval 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 con-
fess 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, un-
truthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate,
shallow, immeasurably selfish" . . . yet still ... "in sev-
eral 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 preju-
dice" 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 con-
veniently forgotten of late years that they ever held.
It was not the old Germany that he admired — never
that! It was Wilh elm's Germany, Bismarck's Ger-
many. He who, in the "Connecticut Yankee," had set
out to make medieval England a ' ' going concern ' ' could
hardly do other than adore the most splendid exam-
ple of just that phenomenon in all history.

Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole charac-
ter and point of view of the American magnate. How
enormously preoccupied his later European letters are,

Everybody's Neighbor 137

for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the appur-
tenances 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 Ber-
lin which was "eminently not the place for a distin-
guished 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 en-
gaged 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 :
1 ' He came straight to us, and shook hands and com-
promised 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 news-
paper 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 every-
thing on his reputation ! Was it not his glory that he
was "beset by all the cranks and beggars in Christen-
dom"? 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-destroy-
ing tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, Mark Twain
found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority,
the headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plain-
est and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest

138 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

of all the centuries the world has seen.'* The second
half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with compla-
cent 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 pros-
perity, 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 sug-
gested 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 demo-
cratic 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 chame-
leon which he said man was, had taken the colors of the
privileged class which the new industrial regime 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 let-
ters and see what he says in the privacy of his corres-
pondence 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 politi-
cal aristocracy which could create a presidential succes-
sion ' ' 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

Everybody's Neighbor 139

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 Sans-
culotte, 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 suc-
cess"! Shall I be told that he created quite a scandal
in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and be-
coming a Mugwump? At least he was in very respect-
able 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 an-
nexation 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 civiliza-
tion. . . . i 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

140 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 com-
presses 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 vic-
tim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally
in one situation after another where, in order to sur-
vive, 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 in-
terests 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 feel-
ings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned
a book on England and collected volumes of notes for

Everybody's Neighbor 141

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 considera-
tion 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, pro-
vincial 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 in-
stinctive 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. Eogers, 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

142 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 in-
numerable. 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 V ' " 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 re-
peated.

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

Everybody's Neighbor 143

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, l ' 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 neigh-
borhood was "like one great family with a community
of interests, a unity of ideals," and gradually that cir-
cle, "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 pio-
neer? Let me note them once more: an uncritical and
uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an ex-
pansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting
from his surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes
of action," a naive 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 loyal-
ties. To this let us add, finally, the versatile career of
the jack-of-all-trades. "I have been through the Cali-
fornia mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, spurs and an-
gles, variations and sinuosities. ' I have worked there at
all the different trades and professions known to the cata-
logues." And once, as if to show that he had qualified
for the popular role 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 pub-
lisher : also ' ' an author for twenty years and an ass for
fifty-five."

144 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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, then I 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. Ho wells : ' ' 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! Be-
tween 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 equiva-

Everybody's Neighbor 145

lent 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 hap-
pened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised
its head and perceived, if we may say so, the full extent
of its debacle, Mark Twain was filled with a despondent
desire, a momentary purpose even, to stop writing alto-
gether. ' l Mama and I, ' ' wrote his little daughter Susy,
1 '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 any-
thing." Certainly he would never have so neglected,
abandoned, his own writing to further the literary for-
tunes 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 pub-
lishing 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 perma-
nently. ' ' 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

146 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

reason to continue Jhis 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 M 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 decid-
edly 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 char-
acteristic 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 done
automatically — instantly — perfectly. This is indeed the

Everybody's Neighbor 147

first line of movable types that ever was perfectly
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 re-
spect, 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 occa-
sion 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 hav-
ing produced Walt Whitman,

CHAPTER VII

THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS

"How can great minds be produced in a country where the
test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?"

John Stuart Mill.

WE have now watched the gradual building up and
the final flowering in Mark Twain of the person-
ality 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 ruth-
less opposition to the poet in him, through the shock of
his father's death; and every influence he had encount-
ered 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 dis-
sociated 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

148

The Playboy in Letters 149

forty- three at the time. ' ' Mark is a queer fellow, ' ' says
Twitch ell. ''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 fasci-
nations. 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 after-
ward that he hadn't been so excited in three months.
He acted just like a boy.,, And observe what he said
of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By
temperament I was the kind of person that does things.
Does them and reflects afterward. So I started for the
Amazon without reflecting and without asking any ques-
tions. 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 bit-
terly, 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 dress-
ing 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

150 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 in-
quired, " 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 some-
what 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 appe-
tite 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 particu-
larly 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 rain-
bow," 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 judg-

The Playboy in Letters 151

ment. I shall say nothing here of his truly dazzling
display of this in matters of business. But did not
Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own
countrymen, foretell that within a generation after his
death America would be a monarchy, a literal monarchy,
not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not
affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists
would so increase and multiply that in forty years they
would dominate our political life? There are certainly
at this time Western cities where that has occurred, but
Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to have
glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the
political and economic future seems really bound to
pass. In all the years of his traveling to and fro
through Europe he divined hardly one of the social
tendencies that had so spectacular a denouement within
four years of his death. In Austria, where he spent so
much time at the turning of the century, he was dazzled
by the pomp of the assassinated empress's funeral —
"this murder,' ' he writes, with the fatuity of a school
boy, "will still be talked of and described and painted
a thousand years from now ' ' ; but what did he make of
that memorable clash he witnessed in the Reichsrath
between the Czech and the German deputies? All his-
tory 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 rudi-
mentary 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 inter-
est happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that

152 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 what-
ever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese
war was "entitled to rank as the most conspicuous dis-
aster 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 pub-
lished consist mainly of mere childlike observations of
sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His re-
marks 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. Sup-
pose 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 un-
developed aesthetic sense. "Mark Twain," says his
biographer, "was never artistic, in the common accept-
ance 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 acknow-
ledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the
world remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt

The Playboy in Letters 153

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 — inso-
much 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 perf ectest 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 en-
counter with Flaubert's "Salammbo," which he didn't
like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was
wholly non-aesthetic. He "detested" novels, in particu-
lar: "I never could stand Meredith and most of the
other celebrities," he said, inclusively. He called War-
field's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jeffer-
son'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.

154 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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
aesthetic 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 corre-
spond 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-determina-
tion and self-control, in his laziness and loose extrava-
gance 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 discern-
ment 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

The Playboy in Letters 155

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 prodigal-
ity, 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 ener-
getic 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 play-
boy was squandering not his possessions but himself,
scattering to the winds the resources nature had com-
mitted 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 conse-
quences, was there ever anything like the loose prodi-
gality 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

156 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 throng-
ing 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. "Sher-
lock 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 let-
ters, 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 after-
noon." 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

The Playboy in Letters 157

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 sta-
tistics, 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 charac-
teristic of his whole career? That vast flow, that vast
fog of promiscuous talk — was it garrulous, was it not
rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting frag-
ments 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 fac-
ulty— 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 phenom-
enon who has not acquired the characteristics of the
artist at all, those two supreme characteristics, espe-
cially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his writings —

158 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritan-
ism 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, 111 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 arti-
cles 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 pat-
tern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had
interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; never-
theless, 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, strang-
est of all, as it would seem if we did not know how little

The Playboy in Letters 159

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 perform-
ance"— 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 push-
ing it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have
been all but incapable of absorption. The most engross-
ing idea he ever had was probably that of the "Con-
necticut Yankee," a book at least more ambitious than
any other he attempted. But even the demoniac pos-
session 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 tech-
nique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was
nothing else, surely, than his art. I have just noted
the general character of his aesthetic taste: he was well
satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by aesthetic curi-
osity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he
seems to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his

160 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 pre-
occupation 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 Lan-
guage," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore
Cooper's Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar,"
"William Dean Howells," "General Grant and Mat-
thew 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 imag-
inary 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

The Playboy in Letters 161

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 rudi-
mentary 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 ex-
pedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe.
We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi,
the Vatican — all the galleries. . . . We examined mod-
ern 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 pil-
grimage 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

162 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 Mat-
thew 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 out-
grown 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 Ameri-
can 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 personali-
ties 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

The Playboy in Letters 163

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, autobio-
graphical 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 descrip-
tive 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 realisti-
cally 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

164 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 char-
acter 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 com-
posed 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 naively confesses in the preface of "Those Ex-
traordinary 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

The Playboy in Letters 165

life, he wrote that man is ' ' moved, directed, commanded
by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing
his personal experience.

Glance at his record once more. What led him to
undertake the voyage that resulted in "The Innocents
Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson Burlingame.
After publishing ' ' The Innocents Abroad, ' ' we are told,
"he had begun early in the year to talk about another
book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or
two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It was only
when his publisher came forward and suggested that he
should write a book about his travels and experiences
in the Far West that he set to work at the composition
of "Roughing It." The presence and stimulus of his
friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp
Abroad " : we know this from the fact that he undertook
a subsequent journey down the Rhone with the express
purpose of writing another book which, because, as he
repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted
in nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand
chaotic notes he never used. In 1874 we find him again
waiting for the impulse that seems hardly ever to have
come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to
write for the Atlantic and it is only then that fresh
memories rise in his mind and he begins "Life on the
Mississippi." In 1878, the demand for a new Mark
Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going
to Europe again." The chief motive that roused him
to the composition of "A Connecticut Yankee" seems
to have been to provide an adequate mouthful for the
yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And
even "Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr.
Paine, was not spontaneously born: "He had received
from somewhere new afflatus for the story of Huck and
Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence
in him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist
is illustrated in another trait also. How overjoyed he

166 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

was when he could get Mr. Howells to read his proofs
for him, the proofs even of the books he had written
for love ! And how willing he was to have those proofs
mauled and slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to
The Atlantic," says Mr. Howells, "each a veritable
'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and before he
had finished "Life on the Mississippi ' ' he set his pub-
lisher to work editing it, with the consequence, he writes,
that "large areas of it are condemned here and there
and yonder."

Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark
Twain's notorious "laziness." Mr. Paine assures us
that he was not lazy in the ordinary sense of the word :
"that he detested manual labor is. true enough, but at
the work for which he was fitted and intended it may
be set down here on authority (and despite his own
frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last
year he was the most industrious of men." Very well,
but what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that
love of "the loose luxury of undress and the comfort
of pillows" which grew upon him, especially in later
years, when he received his company propped up in
bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state
of coma and lazy comfort and solid happiness" into
which he was always drifting, that indolence which,
aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to
spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins?
Much of it, no doubt, was a pose: it was a way of
protesting to the public and his matter-of-fact friends
that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether useless
as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too
seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his
"frequent assertions to the contrary." But part of
this lax mood was involuntary, and is not to be attrib'
uted to his Southern temperament ; it was the sign that
he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as
it were of those great sails the wind had never filled.

The Playboy in Letters 167

There he was, a man, with all the powers and energies
of a man, living the irresponsible life of a boy; there
he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of
a journalist; everything he did was a hundred times
too easy for him; the goal he had set himself, the goal
that had been set for him, was so low that it not only
failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged him
to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy
to the capitalist regime which, as Mr. Veblen describes
it, is capable of reaping its profits only by maintaining
throughout the industrial system in general a certain
"incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare
himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this
laziness was predestined. Mr. Paine 's biography opens
with these words: "On page 492 of the old volume of
Seutonius, which Mark Twain read until his very last
day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man
of wide repute 'for his want of energy/ and in a
marginal note he has written : ' I guess this is where our
line starts.' " If people are lazy, one imagines him
saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault.
But who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the
man who is descended from a lazy line?

It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative
life that we can explain also the endless distractions to
which his literary career was subject. "I came here,"
he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take notes
for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners
and make speeches." That innocent reclame of his, that
irresistible passion for the limelight which was forever
drawing off the forces that ought to have been invested
in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his inordinate
desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his
heart had been in his work would he have courted so
many interruptions ? For court them he did : he invited,
he brought upon himself a mode of living that made
work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything

168 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

done worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except
during the three or four months that we are away in
the summer. ... I keep three or four books on the
stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory
chapter to one of them. ' ' Was Mrs. Clemens to blame ?
"We are distinctly told that she was dazed, that she was
appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into
which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast
energy had flowed into this channel of the opulent
householder because it had not been able to find free
expression in his work, and the happier he was in
that role the more irksome his work became. "Maybe
you think I am not happy ?" he writes. "The very
thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to
be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that
hereafter I won't be." And at that brilliant apogee
of his life, when his daughter noted that he had just
become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his
writing quarters in the billiard-room where, per-
fect witness that he was to the truth of Herbert
Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a mis-
spent youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his
friends and impress them into the game, where, indeed,
he could almost count on the pleasure of being inter-
rupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere
appanage of his domestic life, whose writing went by
fits and starts, and who certainly took no pains to keep
himself in form for it, had such a passion for billiards
that he would play all night and "stay till the last man
gave out from sheer exhaustion."

For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the
whole, happy in his work; almost from the beginning
of his career we note in him an increasing distaste for
this literary journalism which he would hardly have
experienced if he had not been intended for quite
another life. We remember that cry of distress when
he was setting out on the Quaker City excursion, that

The Playboy in Letters 169

cry which must have seemed so fantastically meaning-
less to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless
that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish
anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.
. . . An accusing conscience gives me peace only in
excitement and restless moving from place to place/ '
What was it but the conscience of the artist in him,
lulled into a fitful sleep by the applause of all America
before it had ever been able quite to penetrate into
the upper layers of his mind ? Mr. Paine has noted the
change in tone between the first and second parts of
"Life on the Mississippi,' ' written with an interval of
twelve years, the change from "art" to "industry,"
the difference "between the labors of love and duty":
he avers that the second half might have been as glam-
orous as the first if Mark Twain had revisited the river
eight or ten years earlier, "before he had become a
theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had
become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would
have his task explaining, in that connection, the dif-
ference between "theoretical" pessimism and pessimism
of the other sort! For it was just so between "The
Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was
even more so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Fol-
lowing the Equator": "In the 'Tramp,' " says Mr.
Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has
become a cynic ; restrained, but a cynic none the less. ' '
All that descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps,
he could count upon an absolutely certain financial suc-
cess— how repellant it became to him as time went on!
Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the self-
imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his
friend Twitchell that he has lost his Swiss note-book,
and, who knows? perhaps he won't have to write the
book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, and
he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my
publisher and propose some other book, when the con-

170 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

founded thing turned up, and down went my heart into
my boots.' ' It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that
he had been given a life-sentence. ' ' And to what does
he turn for relief? "The Prince and the Pauper,"
which he lingers over and cannot bear to finish, telling
Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare " of
"A Tramp Abroad/ ' nothing can diminish his jubilant
delight in writing it. He is a child among children
again, doing a task that almost any gifted child might
have done, something that is for him the equivalent of
a charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and
basking for the moment in the approval of his wife.

"We have seen — and it seems to me the most conclusive
proof of his arrested development — that Mark Twain
showed not only no respect for literature but no vital,
personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What is the
true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry
James, in his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it,
I think — over-expressed it, in his passionate anxiety not
to do so — in something he wrote once of his early tales:
"I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as we
say, more than for aught else whatever — cared for them
with that kind of care, infatuated though it may seem,
that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much
as speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of
piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect free-
dom of mind as to everything but them.,, Compare
this with what Mark Twain wrote when he was setting
to work at "The American Claimant" : "My right arm
is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to
write this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it — no, I
mean 1,000,000 — next fall). I feel sure I can dictate
the book into a phonograph if I don't have to yell."
That is only an extreme instance of what appears to
have been his habitual attitude toward his work, an
attitude of almost cynical indifference, of insolence
even.

The Playboy in Letters 171

Once, however, he approached it in quite a different
spirit, with a significant and exceptional result that
proves the rule. " Though the creative enthusiasm in
his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, "his glory-
in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he
made on his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all
his important works lay far behind him, he said: "I
like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and it
is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really
consider it his best book? We shall see presently that
in this, as in other matters, his judgment was quite
unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and cer-
tainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer,"
no one else can take very seriously a work that is, for
all its charm, scarcely anything but a literary chromo.
Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with such
a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no
ulterior object in view in writing it, because, for once,
in this book, he had approached his work in the spirit,
at least, of the artist and the craftsman. "Possibly,"
we find him writing to a friend, and how exceptional
the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen! — "possibly the
book may not sell, but that is nothing — it was written
for love." But more striking still is the testimony of
a later note: "It furnished me seven times the pleasure
afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of
preparation and two years of writing. The others
needed no preparation and got none." In other words,
in this book alone he had consciously exercised the
instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised
in that career as a pilot to which he always looked back
so regretfully. What if "Huckleberry Finn" was in-
comparably greater? What if he had for "Tom Saw-
yer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection?
There he had been simply the "divine amateur," im-
provising the tale of his own fond memories; and
however much he loved them, he took no particular

172 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

pride in the writing of them ; he never thought of pub-
lishing them anonymously, as he published "Joan" at
first, lest it should suffer from the obloquy of a pen-
name that had been compromised by so many dubious
ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's
attitude of indifference toward the always ungram-
matical and often improper Odyssey of his own child-
hood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those
twelve years of preparation, those two years of writing
were the secret of his delight in it, his respect for it.
A poor thing but indubitably mine, the spirit of the
artist in him seems to be saying — that spirit which
came into its own so late and burned so feebly then
and was so quickly gutted out. Did he not call it "a
book which writes itself, a tale which tells itself: I
merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only
in the dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a
rechauffe for children, for sentimental, grown-up chil-
dren. Something of his own personality, no doubt,
went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an
obscurely treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his
pride and his joy in the book sprang, one feels, from a
more specific achievement : he had never known so fully
before what absorption means, what it means to take
pains in all the complicated sense of honest workman-
ship.

If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy in-
deed to determine the measure of Mark Twain's
maturity, to prove that he was at the same time a born
artist and one who never developed beyond the primi-
tive stage. Only once, and with a significant result in
his own confession, have we found him working at
literature as the artist works. But think of the care
he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He
was, says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public
performer I ever saw. . . . On the platform he was the
great and finished actor which he probably would not

The Playboy in Letters 173

have been on the stage/ ' And to what was this emi-
nence due ? — ■ ' his carefully studied effects. ' ' This man,
who was capable of all but " yelling' ■ his books into a
phonograph, approached the platform with all the cir-
cumspection of a conscious master: there we find him
prudent, prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking
pains, as he shows in one of his letters, to rest and equip
himself beforehand. "Unless I get a great deal of
rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his
" laziness, ' ' "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me
on the platform, and turns my performance into work,
and hard work, whereas it ought always to be pastime,
recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice of the
artist, the prompting of the true craftsman 's conscience.
I have said that he was indifferent to technique, abnor-
mally incurious, in fact, of all the means of the literary
art. But who that has read his essay, "How to Tell a
Story," will forget the proud skill of the raconteur of
"The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist
is just an inspired child of nature might well consider
the attitude of mind revealed in this little essay. Mark
Twain first heard the story of the "Golden Arm"
from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as
a boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him
reverent in the Holy Land because of the initiation of
the Sunday School, so now we see him reverent in art
because of the initiation of that first master who had
remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his
only master. To tell that story rightly, to pause just
long enough in just the proper places, to enunciate each
word with just the accurate emphasis, and at last — oh!
so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such
control, to spring that final effect of horror ! — there was
something worthy of a man 's passionate endeavor ! Did
not Mark Twain assert again and again, in his old age,
that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable
through the M outside helps afforded by the ideals, influ-

174 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

ences, and training" of the society into which he is
born? Who, in the Gilded Age of America, cared for
literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, to glorify
it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts
had Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative
authority, in essential authority, with that old negro
raconteur, that old pilot of the Mississippi? What real
criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark Twain,
the writer, ever received ? Had not his wife, indifferent
to his best work, encouraged him to write puerilities?
Had not Howells even, the "Critical Court of Last
Resort in this country," praised him as often for his
ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who
had expected anything of him, in short, or put him on
his mettle ? But at least America understood the primi-
tive art of oral story-telling, at least America had
understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot:
in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain
had found inspiring masters, he had encountered a
penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and thrilling appre-
ciation ; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass
muster and he had done so ! What if he had never read
"Balzac and the others"? That old negro of his child-
hood, with all his ancient, inherited folk-skill — he was
Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist ever more
fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his
metier, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of
the source, ever more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor,
to the point where, before going his own way, he could
almost do what the high priest himself had done. Mark
Twain had never individually "come into his intel-
lectual consciousness," in Mr. Howells 's phrase, at all;
his creative spirit had remained rudimentary and almost
undifferentiated; but that his natural genius was very
great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest
with which he threw himself into those approximately
artistic channels he found open before him.

The Playboy in Letters 175

It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr.
Paine says, that life should begin with old age and
progress backwards. We can understand it now; we
can understand why his mind was essentially retro-
spective and why so much of his writing deals with his
childhood. The autobiographical impulse is normal in
old age : when men cannot build on hope they build on
memory, their minds regress into the past because they
no longer have a future. It is generally understood,
therefore, that when people in middle age occupy them-
selves with their childhood it is because some central
instinct in them has been blocked by either internal
or external obstacles : their consciousness flows backward
until it reaches a period in their memory when life
still seemed to them open and fluid with possibilities.
Who does not see in the extraordinary number of books
about boys and boyhood written by American authors
the surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral
development which is the result of the business life, the
universal repression in the American population of all
those impulses that conflict with commercial success?
So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiograph-
ical impulse, characteristic of old age, awoke very early :
as far back as 1880 we find him "attempting, from
time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an absolutely
faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt
in 1885, at the time when he was assisting Grant with
his Memoirs. It remained his dominant literary im-
pulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you can't,"
says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark
Twain had "assumed" the character of his middle
years; he had only truly lived, he had only been him-
self, as a child, and the experience of childhood was
the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he
was perpetually recurring to his early life in Hannibal,
why the books he wrote con amove were books about
childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not only

176 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or
something in him knew, what many another American
author has known since, that he was capturing the whole
public. Ten million business men — that was the public,
the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are
not business men in general, in a sense not quite in-
tended by the coiner of the phrase, ' * children of a larger
growth''?

Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children.
It is true that he seems often to have believed that
"Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" could only
be understood and appreciated by mature readers; cer-
tainly "Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical
romance for mature readers. But what do we find him
saying while he is still at work on "Tom Sawyer"?
"I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech
down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion
of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls."
And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he associate
it in his own mind ? "I am writing, ' ' he says in a letter
to a publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The
Prince and the Pauper,' " and this, added to the fact
that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic consultation
with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its
real character. "Written for children, then, more than
half consciously, all these books were; and I will not
except even "The Mysterious Stranger," permeated as
it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, though an
old man wrote it and few children probably have ever
read it. Written for and written of children all these
books were, for it is clear that the protagonists of ' ' The
Mysterious Stranger" are the boys through whose eyes
the story unfolds itself and who taste its bitterness, and
Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de
Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books
he wrote with love, with a happiness that sometimes
seemed sacred to him. It was this happiness that haloed

The Playboy in Letters 177

the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says that
in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn'' as "undoubt-
edly his best book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer"
a very special feeling is shown in a letter, one of those
famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to a the-
atrical manager who had dramatized the story and pro-
posed to put it on the stage : * ' That is a book, dear sir,
which cannot be dramatized. One might as well try
to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is
simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly
air. ' ' There were plays which he wrote with an exuber-
ant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of the man of
action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a
swift stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in
process of delivering itself. That happiness, I say,
sanctified these children's books alone — these books that
suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering on the
stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close
to the ground.

CHAPTER VIII

THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS

"Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters."

Alexander Harvey.

AT the circus, no doubt, you have watched some
trained lion going through the sad motions of a
career to which the tyrannical curiosity of men has
constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his
part with a certain zest; he has acquired a new set of
superficial habits, and you would say that he finds them
easy and pleasant. Under the surface, however, he
remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It
is only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers
and the guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape
of the ring, the rack and all the rest of the circus-
paraphernalia that he continues to enact this parody of
his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the
imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the
moment when the trainer ceases to crack his whip and
turns his back. In a flash another self has possessed
him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you perceive
the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus
has become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand
years have rolled back in the twinkling of an eye.

So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no real
morals," he wrote in one of his later letters, "but only
artificial ones, morals created and preserved by the
forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts."
Now that is not true of the man who is master of him-
self. The morality of the free man is not based upon

178

Those Extraordinary Twins 179

the suppression of his instincts but upon the discreet
employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial
morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes
to it. Mark Twain, as we have seen, had conformed
to a moral regime in which the profoundest of his in-
stincts could not function: the artist had been sub-
merged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business,
the respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part,
therefore, he had to depend upon the cues his wife and
his friends gave him. Here we have the explanation of
his statement: "Outside influences, outside circum-
stances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to him-
self, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of
time he would keep would not be valuable." We can
see from this how completely his conscious self had
accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he
had concurred in their desire to repress that unmanage-
able creative instinct of his, how ashamed, in short, he
was of it. Nevertheless, that instinct, while repressed,
while unconscious, continued to live and manifest itself
just the same. We shall see that in the end, never hav-
ing been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself,
to air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it
turned as it were black and malignant, like some mon-
strous, morbid inner growth, poisoning Mark Twain's
whole spiritual system. We have now to note its con-
stant blind efforts to break through the censorship that
had been imposed on it, to cross the threshold of the
unconscious and play its part in the conscious life of
this man whose will was always enlisted against it.

First of all, a few instances from his everyday life.
We know that he was always chafing against the scheme
of values, the whole social regime, that was represented
by his wife and his friends. His conscious self urged
him to maintain these values and this regime. His un-
conscious self strove against them, vetoed the force
behind his will, pushed him in just the opposite

180 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

direction. We find this conflict revealed in his story,
" Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian
counterpart of the famous Siamese monstrosity.
" Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, he car-
ried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty
parades, horse races, campaign riots, and everywhere
else that could damage him with his party and his
church; and when it was Angelo 's week he carried
Luigi diligently to all manner of moral and religious
gatherings, doing his best to regain the ground he had
lost. ' ' This story of the two incompatible spirits bound
together in one flesh is, as we can see, the symbol of
Mark Twain himself.

Glance at his business life. He pursued it with
frantic eagerness, urged on by the self that loved suc-
cess, popularity, prestige. Yet he was always in revolt
against it. There were years during which he walked
the floor at night, " over-wrought and unsettled," as he
said, "by apprehensions — badgered, harassed" — and
let us add Mr. Paine 's adjectives — "worried, impatient,
rash, frenzied and altogether upset," till he had to beg
the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent the
pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!"
Why did he always fail in those spectacular ventures of
his? Was it not because his will, which was enlisted
in business, was not supported by a constant, funda-
mental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his
fundamental desire pointed him just the other way?

Then there was his conventional domestic and social
life. He had submerged himself in the role of the hus-
band, the father, the neighbor, the citizen. At once
he became the most absent-minded of men ! His absent-
mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a
development of old age," and he mentions two typical
instances of it when Mark Twain was "in the very
heyday of his mental strength. ' ' Once, when the house
was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures

Those Extraordinary Twins 181

in his own drawing-room when he found them on the
floor, and accused an innocent caller of having brought
them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the householder
was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one
observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was
always protesting against the lot his other self had so
fully accepted, the lot of being "bullyragged," as he
said, by builders and architects and tapestry-devils and
carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and wildcat
gardeners when what was really needed was "an in-
cendiary/ ' Moreover, "he was always forgetting
engagements, ' ' we are told, "or getting them wrong."
And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results too,
for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark
Twain became the innocent cause of the death of one
of his children and only just escaped being the cause
of the death of another. On one occasion, he was driv-
ing with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so
extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe
cold which developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the
other, when he was out with one of his little daughters,
he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and the
baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled
out, with her head bleeding, among the stones by the
roadside. "I should not have been permitted to do it,"
he said of this first misadventure. ' ' I was not qualified
for any such responsibility as that. Some one should
have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind.
Necessarily I would lose myself dreaming." Yes, Mark
Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which the filial
and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every
other caught itself wandering at the critical hour ! And
in that hour the "old Adam," the natural man, the
suppressed poet, registered its tragic protest, took its
revenge, against a life that had left no room for it.
Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment
on Mark Twain's constant absent-mindedness as regards

182 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

domestic matters is to be found in Mr. Paine 's record
that in his dictations in old age he was extremely in-
accurate on every subject except the genesis and writ-
ing of his books. We can see from this that although
his conscious life had been overwhelmingly occupied
with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, his " heart,' '
as we say, had always been, not in them, but in litera-
ture.

And how can we explain the fervor with which this
comrade of Presbyterian ministers and pillars of society,
this husband of that "heavenly whiteness,' ' Mrs.
Clemens, jots in his note-book observations like the
following: "We may not doubt that society in heaven
consists mainly of undesirable persons"? How can
we explain that intemperate, that vehement, that furi-
ous obsession of animosity against the novels of Jane
Austen except as an indirect venting of his hatred of
the primness and priggishness of his own entourage?
I should go even further, I should be even more specific,
than this. Mr. Howells had been Mark Twain's literary
mentor; Mr. Howells had "licked him into shape," had
regenerated him artistically as his wife had regenerated
him socially ; Mr. Howells had set his pace for him, and
Mark Twain, the candidate for gentility, had been over-
flowingly grateful. "Possibly," he had written to this
father confessor, "possibly you will not be a fully
accepted classic until you have been dead one hundred
years — it is the fate of the Shakespeares of all genuine
professions — but then your books will be as common as
Bibles, I believe. In that day, I shall be in the encyclo-
pedias too, thus: 'Mark Twain, history and occupation
unknown; but he was personally acquainted with
Howells.' " We know, as a matter of fact, that he
delighted in the delicacy of Howells 's mind and lan-
guage. But this taste was wholly unrelated to anything
else in Mark Twain's literary horizon. We can say,
with all the more certainty because he "detested" novels

Those Extraordinary Twins 183

in general, that if Ho wells 's novels had been written by
any one else than his friend and his mentor he would
have ignored them as he ignored all other "artistic"
writing, he would even have despised them as he de-
spised all insipid writing. In short, this taste was a
product of personal affection and gratitude; it was
precisely on a par with his attitude toward the pro-
vincial social daintinesses of his wife. And in both
cases, just in the measure that his conscious self had
accepted these alien standards that had been imposed
upon him, his unconscious self revolted against them.
"I never saw a woman so hard to please/' he writes in
1875, "about things she doesn't know anything about."
Mr. Paine hastens to assure us that "the reference to
his wife's criticism in this is tenderly playful, as
always." But what a multitude of dark secrets that
tender playfulness covers! Mark Twain's unconscious
self barely discloses its claws in phrases like that,
enough to show how strict was the censorship he had
accepted. It cannot express itself directly; conse-
quently, like a child who, desiring to strike its teacher,
stamps upon the floor instead, it pours out its accumu-
lated bitterness obliquely. When Mark Twain utters
such characteristic aphorisms as "Heaven for climate,
hell for society," we see the repressed artist in him
striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Keverend Joseph
Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark
Twain called, and with reason, for he seems to have
been the most lovable of men, "a companionship which
to me stands first after Livy's." Similarly, when he
roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we
can see that buried self taking vengeance upon Mr.
Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a prime passion>
who had even taken Jane Austen as a model

We know the constraint to which he submitted as
regards religious observances. "And once or twice,"
he writes, "I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't

184 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked
on Sunday, on the sly." Does it not explain the bitter
animus that lies behind his comical complaint of George
W. Cable, when the two were together on a lecture tour ?
■ — "You will never, never know, never divine, guess,
imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion
can be made until you come to know and study Cable
daily and hourly. ... He has taught me to abhor and
detest the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and trouble-
some ways to dishonor it." Habitually, as we have
seen, he spoke of himself in public as a Presbyterian,
as "Twitchell's parishioner." His buried self redressed
the balance in a passionate admiration for Robert Inger-
soll, the atheist. "Thank you most heartily for the
books," he writes to Ingersoll in 1879. "I am devour-
ing them — they have found a hungry place, and they
content it and satisfy it to a miracle." What, in fact,
were the books he loved best? We find him reading
Andrew D. White's "Science and Religion," Lecky's
" European Morals" and similar books of a rationalistic
tendency. But his favorite authors — after Voltaire,
whom he had read as a pilot — were Pepys, Seutonius
and Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon's " Memoirs" he said
he had read twenty times, and we gather that he almost
learned by heart Seutonius 's record of "the cruelties
and licentiousness of imperial Rome." Why did he
take such passionate pleasure in books of this kind, in
writers who had so freely "spoken out" Hear what
he says in 1904 regarding his own book, "What Is
Man ? ' * — ' l Am I honest ? I give you my word of honor
(privately) I am not. For seven years I have sup-
pressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought
to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are
other difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal
to that one." And when at last he did publish it,
anonymously, it was with this foreword: "Every
thought in them [these papers] has been thought (and

Those Extraordinary Twins 185

accepted as unassailable truth) by millions upon mil-
lions of men — and concealed, kept private. Why did
they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could
not hear) the disapproval of the people around them.
Why have not I published? The same reason has re-
strained me, I think. I can find no other." There we
see, in all its absolutism, the censorship under which
his creative self was laboring. One can easily under-
stand his love for Saint-Simon and Casanova and why,
in private, he was perpetually praising their "unre-
strained frankness."

And is there any other explanation of his "Eliza-
bethan breadth of parlance"? Mr. Howells confesses
that he sometimes blushed over Mark Twain's letters,
that there were some which, to the very day when he
wrote his eulogy on his dead friend, he could not bear
to reread. Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former
years, while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon
"having that swearing out in an instant," he would
never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed
his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark
Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism was obviously the ex-
pression of that vital sap which, not having been per-
mitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and
left there to ferment. No wonder he was always
indulging in orgies of forbidden words. Consider the
famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the
time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal
indetency in the English language that Mark Twain
has not painstakingly resurrected and assembled there t
He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could
not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set
for him the riotous exuberance of his nature, had to
have an escape-valve, and he poured through it a fetid
stream of meaningless obscenity — the waste of a price-
less psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address
he made at a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which

1 86 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

has "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the
world, though no line of it, or even its title, has ever
found its way into published literature. " And who
has not heard one or two of the innumerable Mark
Twain anecdotes in the same vein that are current
in every New York publishing house?

In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extrava-
gant, wasteful ways, the creative self in Mark Twain
constantly strove to break through the censorship his
own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the
unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was
always lying in wait for Mark Twain, the imp of the
burlesque, tempting him to do the outre, the outlandish,
the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had
to labor hardest against. " Well she labored, and well
Mark Twain labored with her ! It was the spirit of the
artist, bent upon upsetting the whole apple-cart of
bourgeois conventions. They could, and they did, keep
it in check j they arrested it and manhandled it and
thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon
it and prevented it from interfering too much with the
respectable tenor of their daily search for prestige and
success. They could baffle it and distort it and oblige
it to assume ever more complicated and grotesque dis-
guises in order to elude them, but they could not kill it.
In ways of which they were unaware it escaped their
vigilance and registered itself in a sort of cipher, for us
of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the
texture of Mark Twain's writings.

For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books
are shot through with all sorts of unconscious revela-
tions of this internal conflict? In the Freudian
psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed
wish. In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to
do but have been prevented from doing either by the
exigencies of our daily routine, or by the obstacles
of convention, or by some other form of censorship

Those Extraordinary Twins 187

which has been imposed upon us, or which we our-
selves, actuated by some contrary desire, have will-
ingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, are not
so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, ab-
surd. In such cases it is because two opposed wishes,
neither of which is fully satisfied, have met one another
and resulted in a " com promise* ' — a compromise that
is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two
railway trains running at full speed. These mechan-
isms, the mechanisms of the ' 'wish-fulfillment' ' and the
"wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud has shown, in
many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever,
for any reason, the censorship is relaxed, the censor is
off guard, whenever we are day-dreaming and give way
to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious bestirs itself
and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those embar-
rassing slips of the tongue, those "tender playful-
nesses," that express our covert intentions, slays our
adversaries, sets our fancies wandering in pursuit of all
the ideals and all the satisfactions upon which our cus-
tomary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's
books, or rather in a certain group of them, his "fan-
tasies" we can see this process at work. Certain sig-
nificant obsessions reveal themselves there, certain fixed
ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am
writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regard-
ing some manuscripts that are not to be published until
after his death. ' ' On these terms only can a man be ap-
proximately frank. He cannot be straightly and un-
qualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it."
When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven,"
"Pudd'nhead Wilson," "The American Claimant,"
"Those Extraordinary Twins," he was frank without
knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he
wrote his Autobiography, found that he was unable to
tell the truth about himself, has conducted us unawares
in these writings into the penetralia of his soul.

188 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

Let us note, pref atorily, that in each case Mark Twain
was peculiarly, for the time being, free of his censor-
ship. That he wrote at least the first draft of "Cap-
tain Stormfield', in reckless disregard of it is proved
by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to
publish the book at all but kept it locked away in his
safe. As for "The American Claimant," "Pudd'n-
head Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins/' he
wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Type-
setting Machine. Shortly before, he had been on the
dizziest pinnacle of worldly expectation. Calculating
what his returns from the machine were going to be, he
had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with
figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently
approached the billion mark." Then, suddenly, re-
duced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself once
more dependent upon authorship for a living. He had
passed, in short, through a profound nervous and emo-
tional cataclysm: "so disturbed were his affairs, so dis-
ordered was everything," we are told, "that sometimes
he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At
such times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down;
people commit all sorts of aberrations, "go off the han-
dle," as we say; the moral habits of a lifetime give
way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible
animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result
was a violent effort on the part of his suppressed self
to assert its supremacy in a propitious moment when
that other self, the business man, had proved abysmally
weak. That is why these books that marked his return
to literature appear to have the quality of nightmares.
He has told us in the preface to "Those Extraordinary
Twins" that the story had originally been a part of
"Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an
Italian monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had
meant to write an extravagant farce about them; but,

Those Extraordinary Twins 189

he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce to a
tragedy while I was going along with it — a most em-
barrassing circumstance." Eventually, he realized that
it was "not one story but two stories tangled together"
that he was trying to tell, so he removed the twins from
"Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales sepa-
rately. That alone shows us the confusion of his mind,
the confusion revealed further in "The American
Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead "Wilson" as it stands.
They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of
passionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of
itself, angry satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-
headed chimeras, in short, that leave the reader's mind
in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far relaxed
its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the sur-
face: the battle of the two Mark Twains takes place
almost in the open, under our very eyes.

Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple exam-
ple of "wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield
arrives in heaven, he is surprised to find that all sorts
of people are esteemed among the celestials who have
had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward
J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his
lifetime, but the Tennessee village folk scoffed at him;
they would have none of him, they made cruel sport
of him. In heaven things are different ; there the celes-
tials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token
of this Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before
him.

Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describ-
ing the actual fate of his own spirit and that ample
other fate his spirit desires. It is the story of Cin-
derella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by the
prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the au-
thor. We note the significant parallel that the Tennes-
see village where the unappreciated poet lived to the

190 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

scornful amusement of his neighbors is a duplicate of
the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the
milieu of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

This inference is corroborated by the similar plight
of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom
we should have identified with Mark Twain even if the
latter had not repeatedly assured us that an author
draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not
know that Pudd'nhead 's " calendar" was so far Mark
Twain's own calendar that he continued it in two later
books, " Following the Equator" and "A Double-Bar-
relled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is sim-
ply another Edward J. Billings and the village folk
treat him in just the same fashion. "For some years,"
says the author, "Wilson had been privately at work
on a whimsical almanac, for his amusement — a calendar,
with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in
ironical form, appended to each date, and the Judge
thought that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were
neatly turned and cute ; so he carried a handful of them
around one day, and read them to some of the chief
citizens. But irony was not for those people ; their men-
tal vision was not focussed for it. They read those
playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided with-
out hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that
Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead — which there hadn't —
this revelation removed that doubt for good and all."
And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him
before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an
all-round genius — a genius of the first water, gentle-
men; a great scientist running to seed here in this
village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets
generally get at home — for here they don't give shucks
for his scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory
— hey, Dave, ain 't it so ? . . . Come, Dave, show the gen-
tlemen what an inspired Jack-at-all-science we've got
in this town and don't know it." Is it possible to doubt

Those Extraordinary Twins 191

that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was
picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a
buffoon of him? Hardly, when we consider the vindic-
tive delight with which he pictures Pudd'nhead out-
manoeuvring the village folk and triumphing over them
in the end.

Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness
of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, ' ' a story
written late in life when his great fame and position en-
abled him to override the censorship and speak with
more or less candor. "The temptation and the down-
fall of a whole town," says Mr. Paine, "was a colossal
idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardoni-
cally worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral
force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly
jeered at in the market-place. For once Mark Twain
could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteous-
ness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and
that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery.
Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the
idea of demoralizing a whole community — of making its
'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by leading them
into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them
yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment
when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the
world." It was the "leading citizens," the pillars of
society Mark Twain had himself been hobnobbing with
all those years, the very people in deference to whom he
had suppressed his true opinions, his real desires, who
despised him for what he was and admired him only for
the success he had attained in spite of it — it was these
people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, im-
posed upon him, that he attacks in this terrible story of
the passing stranger who took such a vitriolic joy in ex-
posing their pretensions and their hypocrisy. ' ' I passed
through your town at a certain time, and received a
deep offense which I had not earned. ... I wanted

192 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

to damage every man in the place, and every woman.' '
Is not that the unmistakable voice of the misprized
poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that
has turned, the angel that has grown diabolic in a
world that has refused to recognize its divinity?

Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have
the "wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere
we find the wish, the desire of the suppressed poet for
self -effectuation, expressing itself in many vague hopes
and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the suppressed
poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells
about the latter 's novel, " Indian Summer" — saying
that it gives a body "a cloudy sense of his having
been a prince, once, in some enchanted, far-off land,
and of being an exile now, and desolate — and Lord, no
chance ever to get back there again!" And consider
the unfinished tale of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the
story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of a young lover
who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an
old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders
at last down into subterranean passages beneath the
castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty years."
There is something inescapably personal about that.
As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The
American Claimant" — so different from the Colonel
Sellers of "The Gilded Age," who is supposed to be
the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after
one of his uncles — every one has noted that it is a bur-
lesque upon his own preposterous business life. Isn 't it
more than this? That rightful claimant to the great
title of nobility, living in exile among those fantastic
dreams of wealth that always deceive him — isn't he the
obscure projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain him-
self, inept in the business life he is living, incapable
of substantiating his claim, and yet forever beguiled
by the hope that some day he is going to win his true
rank and live the life he was intended for? The

Those Extraordinary Twins 193

shadowy claim of Mark Twain's mother's family to an
English earldom is not sufficient to account for his con-
stant preoccupation with this idea.

Just before Mark Twain 's death, he recalled, says Mr.
Paine, "one of his old subjects, Dual Personality, and
discussed various instances that flitted through his mind
— Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and fact. ' ' One
of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever
have been aware of the extent to which his writings re-
vealed that conflict in himself ? Why was he so obsessed
by journalistic facts like the Siamese Twins and the
Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the
usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the
cradle perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from
"Puddn'head Wilson" and "The Gilded Age" and the
variation of it that constitutes "The Prince and the
Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in
the role of the beggar-boy — Mark Twain has drawn him-
self there, just as he has drawn himself in the "William
Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the Recent
Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by
dramatically slaying the conscience that torments him.
And as for that pair of incompatibles bound together in
one flesh — the Extraordinary Twins, the "good" boy
who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the
"bad" boy of whom society disapproves — how many
of Mark Twain's stories and anecdotes turn upon that
same theme, that same juxtaposition! — does he not re-
veal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true
history of his life?

We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms
Mark Twain was expressing his true opinions, the opin-
ions of the cynic he had become owing to the suppres-
sion and the constant curdling as it were of the poet in
him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of
American progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee
at the Court of King Arthur," the disappointed poet

194 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

kept up a refrain like this: " October 12, the discovery.
It was wonderful to find America, but it would have
been more wonderful to lose it." In all this group
of writings we have been discussing, however, we can
see that while the censorship had been sufficiently relaxed
in the general confusion of his life to permit his un-
conscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant
enough to cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that
Pudd'nhead jots down his saturnine philosophy; it is
only in secret, in a private diary like Pudd 'nhead 's,
that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claim-
ant,' ' thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent
democracy where "prosperity and position constitute
rank." Here, as in the malevolent, Mephistophelian
"passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted Had-
leyburg, ' ' Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he
does so, we perceive, only by taking cover behind a
device that enables him to save his face and make good
his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained fool
about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with
his finger-print invention — otherwise he would find
something better to do than to spend his time writing
nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how could you
expect a young English snob to know anything about
democracy? That was the reaction upon which Mark
Twain could safely count in his readers; they would
only be fooling themselves, of course, they would know
that they were fooling themselves : but in order to keep
up the great American game of bluff they would have to
forgive him! ■ As long as he never hit below the belt by
speaking in his own person, in short, he was perfectly
secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the
public in the hollow of his hand, knew it.

It is only after some such explanation as this that
we can understand the supremacy among all Mark
Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn." Through
the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little

Those Extraordinary Twins 195

boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was
licensed to let himself go. We have seen how indifferent
his sponsors were to the writing and the fate of this
book: "nobody," says Mr. Paine, "appears to have been
especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the
publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer
was Mark Twain! Anything that little vagabond said
might be safely trusted to pass the censor, just because
he was a little vagabond, just because, as an irresponsi-
ble boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones
of this world, know anything in • any case about life,
morals and civilization. That Mark Twain was almost,
if not quite, conscious of his opportunity we can see
from his introductory note to the book: "Persons at-
tempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prose-
cuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be
banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will
be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he can
actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having
a motive! Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness
and general outrageousness are so many shields behind
which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of the bag
with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain
sense of his unusual security when he wrote some of the
more cynically satirical passages of the book, when he
permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the mob, when he
drew that picture of the audience who had been taken
in by the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their
townspeople, when he has the King put up the notice,
"Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: "There,
if that line don 't fetch them, I don 't know Arkansaw ! ' '
The withering contempt for humankind expressed in
these episodes was of the sort that Mark Twain ex-
pressed more and more openly, as time went on, in his
own person; but he was not indulging in that costly
kind of cynicism in the days when he wrote "Huckle-
berry Finn." He must, therefore, have appreciated the

196 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the lap
of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was
only a trivial detail in his general sense of happy expan-
sion, of ecstatic liberation. " Other places do seem so
cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't," says
Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy
and comfortable on a raft." Mark Twain himself was
free at last ! — that raft and that river to him were some-
thing more than mere material facts. His whole uncon-
scious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst
its bonds and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we
need any other explanation of the abandon, the beauty,
the eternal freshness of * ' Huckleberry Finn ' ? ? Perhaps
we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repres-
sion was not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it
flies like a gay, bright, shining arrow through the tepid
atmosphere of American literature, it is because of the
straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that
gave it its momentum.

Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that
Mark Twain was intended for a vastly greater des-
tiny, for the role of a demiurge, in fact, we might
have been glad of all those petty restrictions and mis-
prisions he had undergone, restrictions that had pre-
pared the way for this joyous release. No smoking on
Sundays! No "swearing" allowed! Neckties having
to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and
Qs, petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had
had to submit, the domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the
literary diet of Mr. Howells, those second parents who
had taken the place of his first — we have to thank it,
after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promis-
cuous and general revolt of Huckleberry Finn:

"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it and it don't work;
it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The
widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them ways.
She makes me git up just at the same time every morning; she

Those Extraordinary Twins 197

makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me
sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that
just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to any air git through
'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down,
nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a
cellar door for — well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church
and sweat and owcat — I hate them ornery sermons! I can't
ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday.
The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up
by a bell — everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it. "

"Well, everybody does that way, Huck. "

"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I
can't stand it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub comes
too easy. I don 't take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to
ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in a-swimming — dern'd
if I hain't got to ask to do everything. Well, I'd got to talk
so nice it wasn't no comfort — I'd got to go up in the attic and
rip out a while, every day, to git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a
died, Tom. The widder wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let
me yell, she wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before
folks. ... I had to shove, Tom — I just had to. . . . Now these
clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I ain't ever going
to shake 'em any more. ..."

This chapter began with the analogy of the lion in
the circus. You see what happens with Mark Twain
when the trainer turns his back.

CHAPTER IX

MARK TWAIN 's HUMOR

"To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is
nobler and less trouble. "

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

AND now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor.
We recall how reluctant Mark Twain was to
adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he was
in revolt against a role which, as he vaguely felt, had
been thrust upon him: that he considered it necessary
to publish his "Joan of Arc" anonymously is only one
of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark Twain
was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
His humorous writing he regarded as something ex-
ternal to himself, as something other than artistic self-
expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it,
we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral
and esthetic development. We have seen, on the other
hand, that he adopted this career because his humor
was the only writing he did in Nevada that found
an appreciative audience and that the immediate
result of his decision was that he obtained from the
American public the prodigious and permanent ap-^
proval which his own craving for success and prestige
had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts
our discussion of Mark Twain's humor will have to
explain. We must see what that humor was, and what
produced it, and why in following it he violated his
own nature and at the same time achieved such ample
material rewards.

198

Mark Twain's Humor 199

It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's
humor, of which we have evidences during the whole
of his adolescence, came to the front; and it is a nota-
ble fact that almost every man of a literary tendency
who was brought into contact with those pioneer condi-
tions became a humorist. The "funny man" was one
of the outstanding pioneer types; he was, indeed, vir-
tually the sole representative of the Kepublic of Letters
in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker,
Petroleum V. Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack
Downing, even Bret Harte, sufficiently remind us of
this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical
effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humor-
ous cast. Plainly, also, the humorist was a type that
pioneer society required in order to maintain its psychic
equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems to have divined this in
his description of Western humor. "It is a distinct
product/' he says. "It grew out of a distinct condi-
tion— the battle with the frontier. The fight was so
desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender.
Women laughed that they might not weep; men, when
they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the
result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
but there is tragedy behind it."

Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor
by noting Mark Twain's instinctive reaction to the life
in Nevada. It is evident that in many ways, and in
spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found that
life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly con-
fesses in his diary and letters, indeed, to the misery
it involves. "I do hate to go back to the Washoe," he
writes, after a few weeks of respite from mining. "We
fag ourselves completely out every day." He describes
Nevada as a place where the devil would feel home-
sick: "I heard a gentleman say, the other day, that it

was the 'd dest country under the sun' — and that

comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never

200 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow
here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. . . . Our city
lies in the midst of a desert of the purest — most un-
adulterated and uncompromising — sand." And as with
the setting — so with the life. " High-strung and neu-
rotic/ ' says Mr. Paine, "the strain of newspaper work
and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him": more
than once he found it necessary — this young man of
twenty-eight — "to drop all work and rest for a time at
Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where
there were boiling springs and steaming fissures in the
mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." That »he
found the pace in California just as difficult we have his
own testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the

"d n San Francisco style of wearing out life," the

"careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made his brief
escape to the Sandwich Islands — "God, what a contrast
with California and the Washoe"! — ever sweet and
blessed in his memory. Never, in short, was a man more
rasped by any social situation than was this young
"barbarian," as people have called him, by what people
also call the free life of the West. We can see this in
his profanity, which also, like his humor, came to the
front in Nevada and remained one of his prominent
characteristics through life. We remember how "mad"
he was, ' ' clear through, ' ' over the famous highway rob-
bery episode: he was always half -seriously threatening
to kill people ; he threatened to kill his best friend, Jim
Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr.
Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight
of galvanic waves ' ' ; naturally, therefore, no one in Vir-
ginia, according to one of the Gillis brothers, could "re-
sist the temptation of making Sam swear. ' ' Naturally ;
but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was liv-
ing in a state of chronic nervous exasperation.

Was this not due to the extraordinary number of re-
pressions the life of pioneering involved? It is true

Mark Twain's Humor 201

that it was, in one sense, a free life. It was an irre-
sponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with
domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be
freer in that sense than the society of the gold-seekers in
Nevada and California as we find it pictured in ' ' Rough-
ing It. ' ' Free as that society was, nevertheless, scarcely
any normal instinct could have been expressed or satis-
fied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they
were civilized men, often of gentle birth and education,
men for whom civilization had implied many restraints,
of course, but innumerable avenues also of social and
personal expression and activity to which their natures
were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore,
they had only placed themselves in a position where
their instincts were blocked on every side. There were
so few women among them, for instance, that their
sexual lives were either starved or debased; and chil-
dren were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp,
a story that shows how hysterical, in consequence of
these and similar conditions, the mining population
was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of
complex tastes and preferences found themselves
obliged to conform to a single monotonous routine.
There were criminal elements among them, too, which
kept them continually on their guard, and at best they
were so diverse in origin that any real community of
feeling among them was virtually impossible. In be-
coming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept
a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their
individuality, to conceal their differences and their
personal pretensions under the mask of a rough good-
fellowship that found expression mainly in the ner-
vously and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon,
the brothel and the gambling-hell. Mark Twain has
described for us the "gallant host" which peopled this
hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, quick-
moving, strong-handed young giants — the very pick

202 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

and choice of the world's glorious ones." Where are
they now? he asks in "Roughing It." "Scattered to
the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or decrepit
— or shot or stabbed in street affrays — or dead of dis-
appointed hopes and broken hearts — all gone, or nearly
all, victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf."
We could not have a more conclusive proof of the total
atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed.

Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce
intensity of that life, which burnt itself out so quickly.
We can see this, indeed, in the fact that it was marked
by an incessant series of eruptions. The gold-seekers
had come of their own volition, they had to maintain
an outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were,
to a conspiracy of masculine silence regarding these re-
pressions, of which, in fact, in the intensity of their
mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the
human organism will not submit to such conditions
without registering one protest after another; accord-
ingly, we find that in the mining-camps the practical
joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity
was almost the normal language, and murder was com-
mitted at all hours of the day and night. Mark Twain
tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so common
that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two
in the newspaper, and ' ' almost every man ' ' in the town,
according to one of his old friends, "had fought with
pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels." We
have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a
life of chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say
now that, in a lesser degree, it was a life of chronic
nervous exasperation for all the pioneers?

But why? What do we mean when we speak of re-
pressions? We mean that individuality, the whole com-
plex of personal desires, tastes and preferences, is in-
hibited from expressing itself, from registering itself.
The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one,

Mark Twain's Humor 203

but, victims as they were of their own thirst for gold,
they could not withdraw from it; and their masculine
pride prevented them even from openly complaining
or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already
pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to
that of soldiers in the trenches. And, like the soldiers
in the trenches, they were always on the verge of laugh-
ter, which philosophers generally agree in calling a re-
lief from restraint.

We are now in a position to understand why all the
writers who were subjected to these conditions became
humorists. The creative mind is the most sensitive
mind, the most highly individualized, the most compli-
cated in its range of desires: consequently, in circum-
stances where individuality cannot register itself, it
undergoes the most general and the most painful repres-
sion. The more imaginative a man was the more he
would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by
such a life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his
comrades, was under the necessity of making money,
of succeeding — the same impulse had brought him there
that had brought every one else; we know how deeply
Mark Twain was under this obligation, an obligation
that prevented him from attempting to pursue the
artistic life directly because it was despised and be-
cause to have done so would have required just those
expressions of individuality that pioneer life rendered
impossible. On the other hand, sensitive as he was, he
instinctively recoiled from violence of all kinds and
was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining
those outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels
and murder to which his companions constantly re-
sorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never
"cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that
he "seldom indulged physically" in practical jokes. In
point of fact, he abhorred them. "When grown-up
people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty years

204 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them.
They have lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives,
and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a
job -lot of left-over standards and ideals that would
have been discarded with their boyhood if they had
then moved out into the world and a broader life.
There were many practical jokers in the new Terri-
tory." After all those years he had not outgrown his'
instinctive resentment against the assaults to which his
dignity had had to submit! To Mark Twain, in short,
the life of the gold-fields was a life of almost infinite
repression : the fact, as we have seen, that he became a
universal butt sufficiently proves how large an area of
individuality as it were had to submit to the censorship
of public opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and
"make good" in Nevada.

Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's
humor. An outlet of some kind that prodigious energy
of his was bound to have, and this outlet, since he had
been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into min-
ing, had to be one which, in some way, however
obliquely, expressed the artist in him. That expression,
nevertheless, had also to be one which, far from outrag-
ing public opinion, would win its emphatic approval.
Mark Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow"
in order to succeed, in order to satisfy his inordinate
will-to-power; and we have seen how he acquiesced in
the suppression of all those manifestations of his in-
dividuality— his natural freedom of sentiment, his love
of reading, his constant desire for privacy — that struck
his comrades as "different" or "superior." His choice
of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how urgently
he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this
society where the writer was a despised type. Too sen-
sitive to relieve himself by horseplay, he had what one
might call a preliminary recourse in his profanity, those
"scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing

Mark Twain's Humor 205

at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased
him we can see from Mr. Paine 's remark that his pro-
fanity seemed "the safety-valve of his high-pressure
intellectual engine. . . . When he had blown off he was
always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender.' ' We
can best see his humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine
seems to see it in the phrase, "Men laughed when they
could no longer swear' ' — as the expression, in short, of
a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could
find relief in swearing, as a harmless "moral equiva-
lent," in other words, of those acts of violence which
his own sensitiveness and his fear of consequences alike
prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious
jokes — and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a
ferocity that will hardly be believed by any one who
has not examined them critically — he could vent his
hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those con-
ditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could,
in this vicarious manner, appease the artist in him,
while at the same time keeping on the safe side of public
opinion, the very act of transforming his aggressions
into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made
it a relief to him made it also popular. According to
Freud, whose investigations in this field are perhaps
the most enlightening we have, the pleasurable effect
of humor consists in affording "an economy of expen-
diture in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller
psychic effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke
than in a practical joke or a murder, the common
method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely safer,
too! — a fact that instantly explains the function of the
humorist in pioneer society and the immense success of
Mark Twain. By means of those jokes of his — ("men
were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of one little
contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things
than the editors had spoken each of the other") — his
comrades were able, without transgressing the law and

206 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

the conventions, to vent their own exasperation with the
conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred and
the destructive desires buried under the attitude of
good-fellowship that was imposed by the exigencies of
their work. As for Mark Twain himself, the protec-
tive coloration that had originally enabled him to
maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giv-
ing him the position which he craved, the position of an
acknowledged leader.

For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was
of a singular ferocity. The very titles of his Western
sketches reveal their general character: "The Dutch
Nick Massacre,' ' "A New Crime," " Lionizing Mur-
derers," "The Killing of Julius Caesar 'Localized',"
"Cannibalism in the Cars"; he is obsessed with the fig-
ure of the undertaker and his labors, and it would be
a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the doc-
tor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark
Twain uses the phrase "I brained him on the spot"
or some equivalent. "If the desire to kill and the op-
portunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'n-
head Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent
mood, ' ' who would escape hanging ? ' ' His early humor,
in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It began with
a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine,
"as a special punishment of some particular individual
or paper or locality; but victims were gathered whole-
sale in their seductive web." He was "unsparing in his
ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, the
legislative members, and of individual citizens." He
became known, in fact, as "a sort of general censor,"
and the officials, the corrupt officials — we gather that
they were all corrupt, except his own painfully honest
brother Orion — were frankly afraid of him. "He was
very far, ' ' said one of his later friends, ' * from being one
who tried in any way to make himself popular." To be

Mark Twain's Humor 207

sure he was! He was very far even from trying to be
a humorist!

Do we not recall the early youth of that most un-
humorous soul Henrik Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's
apprentice in a little provincial town, found it impos-
sible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all
that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks,
which brought down upon me the ill-will of all the re-
spectable citizens, who could not enter into that world
which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man
with a highly developed individuality would have re-
acted in the same way; Mark Twain had committed
the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own childhood,
and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens
of Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and
had not been obliged by that old pledge to his mother
to make terms with his environment, his antagonism
would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor,
but of satire also. For it began as satire. He had
the courage of the kindest of hearts, the humanest of
souls: to that extent the poet was awake in him. His
attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than
his pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were
cuffed and maltreated and swindled by the Californians.
In these attacks and these pleas alike he was venting
the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is
the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco
was ' ' weltering in corruption ' ' and the settlers instinct-
ively loathed this condition of things almost as much
as did Mark Twain himself. They could not seriously
undertake to reform it, however, because this corrup-
tion was an inevitable part of a social situation that
made their own adventure, their own success as gam-
bling miners, possible. The desire to change things, to
reform things was checked in the individual by a
counter-desire for unlimited material success that

208 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

throve on the very moral and political disorder against
which all but his acquisitive instincts rebelled. In short,
had Mark Twain been permitted too long to express his
indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have
led sooner or later to a reorientation 'of society that
would have put an end to the conditions under which
the miners flourished, not indeed as human beings, but
as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired
Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved
through it — a relief they expressed in their "storms of
laughter and applause," they could not, beyond a cer-
tain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had
been compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal con-
sequences of a duel. He had gone to San Francisco,
where he had immediately engaged in such a campaign
of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as
Mr. Paine says, "of making the writer's life there diffi-
cult and comfortless." As a matter of fact, "only one
of the several severe articles he wrote criticising offi-
cials and institutions seems to have appeared," the re-
sult being that he lost all interest in his work on the
San Francisco papers. When, on the other hand, he
wrote about San Francisco as a correspondent for his
paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we are
told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation
long restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was
not that of the * ' humorist " ; it was that of the satirist ;
but whether in Nevada or in California he was pro-
hibited, on pain of social extinction, from expressing
himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire,
in short, had become for him as impossible as murder:
he was obliged to remain a humorist.

In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in
the eighties I discover the report of a phrenologist,
one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who found the
trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the
diameter of his head just above the ears. Such testi-

Mark Twain's Humor 209

mony, I suppose, has no value; but it is surely signifi-
cant that this gentleman found the same trait exhibited
in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech."
Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark
Twain "drawl," which he had inherited indeed, but
which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps we can
understand also why it is that half the art of American
humor consists in ' ' keeping one 's face straight. ' ' These
humorists! They don't know themselves how much
they are concealing; and they would be as surprised as
anybody to learn that they are really social revolution-
ists of a sort who lack the courage to admit it.

Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of suc-
cess, was obliged, as I say, to remain a humorist
whether he would or no. When he went East to carry
on his journalistic career, the publishers of The Galaxy,
to which he became a regular contributor, specifically
asked him to conduct a "humorous department"; and
after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" his pub-
lisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and empha-
sized a humorous work — that is to say, a work humor-
ously inclined." We have already seen, in a previous
chapter, that whatever was true of the pioneer society
on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the
rest of the American population during the Gilded Age,
that the business men of the East were in much the
same case as the pioneers of the West. The whole
country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it
was for ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled dur-
ing its generation a national demand as universal in
America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by Dostoiev-
sky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens.
We have at last begun to approach the secret of this in-
teresting fact.

I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American
people during the Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has al-
ready related this to the phenomenon of Mark Twain's

210 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

humor. "We are doubtless/ ' he says, "the most thor-
oughly homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great
nation. In our phrase, we have somehow all 'been
there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile
because we have each somehow known the cheap board-
ing-house or restaurant; when it alludes to putting up
stoves in the fall, each of us feels the grime and rust
of the pipes on his hands.' ' We smile because! In that
"because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's
success. The "cheap boarding-house," where every one
has to pretend that he loves all his neighbors, is the
scene of many restraints and many irritations; and as
for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation
very far from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by
love and duty to indulge in these things, have been
known more than once to complain about them and
even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder.
That was Mark Twain's habitual reaction, as we can
see from the innumerable sketches in which he wades
knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers,
lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators
of the small harassments of life. Mark Twain was more
exasperated by these annoyances of everyday life than
most people are, because he was more sensitive; but,
most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr.
Howells says, all the American people of Mark
Twain's time were exasperated by the same annoy-
ances. They were more civilized individually, in short,
than the primitive environment to which they had to
submit: and Mark Twain's humor gave them, face to
face as they were with these annoyances, the same re-
lief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them,
that is to say, the same "economy of expenditure in
feeling." We "smile because" that humor shows us
that we are all in the same boat ; it relieves us from the
strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables
us to murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone,

Mark Twain's Humor 211

thus absolving us from the odious necessity of shedding
the blood our first impulse prompts us to shed. Mr.
Howells says that ' ' we have somehow all ' been there, ' ' '
a phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical
American of the last generation was "the man who has
risen. " The man who has "risen" is the man who has
become progressively aware of civilization ; and the de-
mands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time,
the demands he made upon his environment, had become,
pari passu, progressively more stringent, while the en-
vironment itself remained, perforce, just as barbarous
and corrupt and unregenerate and " annoying" as
ever. But why perforce? Because it was "good for
business"; it was the environment favorable for a
regime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man
who has risen," the typical American, himself a busi-
ness man?

Now, we have already seen that this process of "ris-
ing in the world, ' ' of succeeding in business, is attained
only at the cost of an all but complete suppression of
individuality. The social effect of the stimulation of
the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general
"levelling down," and this is universally conceded to
have been characteristic of the epoch of industrial
pioneering. The whole nation was practically organized
— by a sort of common consent — on the plan of a vast
business establishment, under a majority rule inalter-
ably opposed to all the inequalities of differentiation
and to a moral and aesthetic development in the in-
dividual that would have retarded or compromised the
success of the business regime. We can see, therefore,
that if Mark Twain's humor was universally popular,
it was because it contributed to the efficiency of this
business regime, because it helped to maintain the
psychic equilibrium of the business man the country
over precisely as it had at first helped to maintain the
psychic equilibrium of the Western pioneer.

212 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called
the "business man's writer." In that humor of his, as
in no other literature, the "strong, silent man" who is
the archtype of the business world, sees an aid rather
than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does
he find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the
question the other way and ask why, in other forms
of literature, he finds a menace and not an aid? The
acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know,
diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all mani-
festations of the creative spirit demand, require, an emo-
tional effort, a psychic cooperation, on the part of the
reader or the spectator. This accounts for the business
man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that ex-
presses itself in a contemptuous desire to ' ' shove him off
the map." Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellec-
tual interest, emotional freedom implies a retardation of
the business man's mental machinery, a retardation of
the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: conse-
quently, the business man shuns everything that dis-
tracts him, confuses him, stimulates him to think or to
feel. Bad for business! On the other hand, he wel-
comes everything that simplifies his course, everything
that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration,
reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind
from opening and responding to the complications and
the implications of the spiritual and intellectual life.
And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor does.
It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins
thought — and especially irreverent toward them ! — when
they gave him a seat below the salt: it degrades, "takes
down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and absurd
everything of a spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual na-
ture the recognition of which, the participation in which,
would retard the smooth and simple operation of the
business man's mind. Mark Twain, as we shall pres-
ently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at

Mark Twain's Humor 213

antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk
with an infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthi-
ness and well-being. That is one aspect of his humor.
In another aspect, he releases, in a hundred murderous
fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the
spleen which the business life, with its repression of
individuality, involves. Finally, in his books about
childhood, he enables the reader to become "a boy
again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional
stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive
moral plane. In all these respects, Mark Twain's
humor affords that "economy of expenditure in feel-
ing" which, as we now perceive, the business man re-
quires as much as the pioneer.

Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's
humor: let us see whether they corroborate this argu-
ment.

In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera
in Mannheim, finds himself seated directly behind a
young girl:

How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she
would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own
thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleas-
ure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams, — no,
she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still a moment. She
was an enchanting study. Her gown was of a soft white silky
stuff that clung to her round young figure like a fish's skin, and
it was rippled over with the gracefullest little fringy films of
lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and
she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little
dewy rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and
so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did
mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red
lips parted, and out leaped her thought, — and with such a guile-
less and pretty enthusiasm, too: ''Auntie, I just know I've got
five hundred fleas on me!"

This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its
author. What is its tendency, as the psychologists

214 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all the normal
emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he
has them so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his
mind on the ''business in hand," which happens to be
the opera. He finds himself actually, prevented as he
is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting
into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then?
He suddenly dashes a pailful of ice-water over this
beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by a turn of the
mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself
evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young
girl will no longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She
has vanished as utterly as a butterfly under a barrel of
quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in the dust,
but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return
to his labors with a soul purified of all troubling
emotions.

Another example, the famous "oesophagus" hoax in
the opening paragraph of "A Double-Barrelled Detec-
tive Story":

It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs
and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning
and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind
nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the
tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegran-
ate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad
splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fra-
grance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning
atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary c&sophagus slept
upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and
the peace of God.

We scarcely need Mr. Paine 's assurance that "the warm
light and luxury of this, paragraph are facetious. The
careful reader will note* that its various accessories are
ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader
will accept the oesophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's
sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the

Mark Twain's Humor 215

contemplation of beauty, which requires an emotional
effort, to degrade beauty and thus divert the reader's
feeling for it.

To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to
simplify the life of the man with an eye single to the
main chance — that, one would almost say, is the general
tendency of Mark Twain 's humor. In almost every one
of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them,
he burns the house down in order to roast his pig — ■
he destroys, that is to say, an entire complex of legi-
timate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single
sham. And, as a rule, even the " shams" are not shams
at all; they are manifestations of just that personal,
aesthetic or moral distinction which any but a bour-
geois democracy would seek in every way to cherish.
Consider, for example, the value assailed in his famous
speech on General Grant and his big toe. The effect of
Mark Twain's humorous assault on the dignity of Gen-
eral Grant was to reduce him not to the human but to
the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence
of the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself ;
and the success of that audacious venture, its success
even with General Grant, was the final proof of the
universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a demo-
cratic regime opposed, in the name of business, to the
recognition of any superior value in the individual:
what made it possible was the fact that Grant himself
had gone the way of all flesh and become a business
man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor
in this kind is, however, the "Connecticut Yankee. "
"It was another of my surreptitious schemes for extin-
guishing knighthood by making it grotesque and ab-
surd, ' ' says the Yankee. ' ' Sir Ozana 's saddle was hung
about with leather hat-boxes, and every time he over-
came a wandering knight he swore him into my service
and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it."
Mark Twain 's contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them,

216 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

liked to imagine that in this fashion he was exposing
shams and pretensions ; bnt unhappily for this argument
knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain
undertook his doughty attack upon it, and it had no
unworthy modern equivalent. To exalt the plug above
the plume was a very easy conquest for our humorist;
it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imag-
ined, from any snobbish self-sufficiency, that the Eng-
lish public failed to be abashed by the book. In this
respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee" was an as-
sault, not upon a social institution, but upon the princi-
ple of beauty itself, an assault, moreover, in the very
name of the shrewd pioneer business man.

How easy it is now to understand the prodigious suc-
cess of "The Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did
precisely at the psychological moment, at the close of
the Civil "War, at the opening of the epoch of industrial
pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had
become obligatory upon every American man! How
easy it is to understand why it was so generally used
as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe ! Set-
ting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of
the author's own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen,
it ridiculed in fact everything of which the author's to-
tally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were ignorant,
everything for which they wished just such an excuse to
be ignorant where knowledge would have contributed
to an individual development incompatible with suc-
cess in business, a knowledge that would have involved
an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too
costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance.
It attacked not only the illegitimate pretensions of the
human spirit but the legitimate pretensions also. It ex-
pressly made the American business man as good as
Titian and a little better : it made him feel that art and
history and all the great, elevated, admirable, painful
discoveries of humankind were things not worth wast-

Mark Twain's Humor 217

ing one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, yes! But
the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century
was notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the
handmaid of commercial philistinism ; and besides, an-
cient Palestine was hardly a rival, in civilization, of
modern America. "I find your people — your best peo-
ple, I suppose they are — very nice, very intelligent, very
pleasant — only talk about Europe,' ' says a traveling
Englishman in one of Howells's novels. "They talk
about London, and about Paris, and about Rome ; there
seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't
seem interested in their own country. I can't make it
out." It was true, true at least of the colonial society
of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of
cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Ameri-
canism of "The Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as
definitely as Whitman 's * ' Leaves of Grass, ' ' the opening
of the national consciousness of which every one hopes
such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves
of Grass," having served to open it, it served also to
postpone its fruition. Its whole tendency ran precisely
counter to Whitman's, in sterilizing, that is to say, in-
stead of promoting, the creative impulses in the in-
dividual. It buttressed the feeble confidence of our
busy race in a commercial civilization so little capable
of commanding the true spiritual allegiance of men that
they could not help anxiously enquiring every traveling
foreigner's opinion of it. Here we have the measure
of its influence both for good and for evil. That in-
fluence was good in so far as it helped to concentrate
the American mind upon the problems and the des-
tinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil,
in so far as it contributed to a national self-complacency,
to the prevailing satisfaction of Americans with a bank-
er's paradise in which, as long as it lasts, the true des-
tinies of America will remain unfulfilled.

So much for the nature and the significance of Mark

218 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

Twain's humor. I think we can understand now the
prodigious practical success it brought him. And are
we not already in a position to see why the role of
humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluc-
tant to adopt it, why he always rebelled against it, and
why it arrested his own development?

Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humor-
ist was the undoing of the artist. It meant the sup-
pression of his aesthetic desires, the degradation of
everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How
can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses with-
out in the end becoming the victim of his own habit?

I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We
know how Mark Twain loved the tales of Sir Thomas
Malory: they were to him a lifelong passion and de-
light. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them:
think of his love for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure
he found in dressing up for charades, of the affection
with which he wrote ' ' The Prince and the Pauper ' ' !
"When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extin-
guish knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the coun-
try laying violent hands on wandering knights and clap-
ping plug-hats on their heads he is doing something
very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American
business man, agreeable to the business man in himself,
but in absolute violation of his own spirit. That is why
his taste remained infantile, why he continued to adore
"knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more
advanced aesthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are
told, was one of "reverence": the reverence which he
felt was the complement of the irreverence with which
he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable : one
can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of per-
petually "taking things down" is that one remains
"down" oneself, and beauty becomes more and more
inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of
art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a bar-

Mark Twain's Humor 219

keeper in heaven." In destroying what he was con-
strained to consider the false pretensions of others, he
destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul.
Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a
protective coloration against the consequences of the
creative life, ended by stunting and thwarting that
creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself a scarred
child.

He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of
humor. "Will a day come," asks Satan, in "The Mys-
terious Stranger, " ' ' when the race will detect the f unni-
ness of these juvenilities and laugh at them — and by
laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its
poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon
— laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication,
persecution — these can lift at a colossal humbug — push
it a little — weaken it a little, century by century; but
only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.
... As a race, do you ever use it at all ? No ; you lack
sense and the courage." It was satire that he had in
mind when he wrote these lines, the great purifying
force with which nature had endowed him, but of the
use of which his life had deprived him. How many
times he confessed that it was he who lacked the
"courage"! How many times we have seen that if he
lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he
lacked the "sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of
his own powers, of his proper function ! Satire necessi-
tates, above all, a supreme degree of moral maturity,
a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual posi-
tion. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to
every irritating stimulus he had literally sworn and
joked away the energy, the indignation, that a free life
would have enabled him to store up, the energy that
would have made him not the public ventilator that ha
became but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mi
Paine speaks of his "high-pressure intellectual engine."

220 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

Let us follow the metaphor by saying that Mark Twain
permitted the steam in his system to escape as fast as
it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of
harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags
and atoms" that world of humbug against which he
chafed all his life. But he had staked everything upon
the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him
an endless series of small assuagements, enabled him to
maintain that equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the
time, ■ ' he wrote in 1895, out of the stress of his financial
anxieties. With that in mind we can appreciate the un-
conscious irony in Mr. Paine 's comment: "Perhaps,
after all, it was his comic outlook on things in general
that was his chief life-saver. ' '

CHAPTER X

LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN

"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence
of ladies."

A Double-Barrelled Detective Story.

I AM persuaded that the future historian of America
will find your works as indispensable to him as
a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire. ' '
In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain him-
self, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly
the dominant intention of Mark Twain's genius, the
role which he was, if one may say so, pledged by nature
to fulfill. "He will be remembered,' ' says Mr. Howells,
"with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes,
with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company. ' '
Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift ! It was as a satirist, we per-
ceive, as a spiritual emancipator, that those of his con-
temporaries who most generously realized him thought
of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that
extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnet-
ism, the radiance of what might be called his tempera-
mental will-to-satire, mistake the wish for the deed ?

What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken,
is one who holds up to the measure of some more or
less permanently admirable ideal the inadequacies and
the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is
Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-minded-
ness the obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Moliere
holding up to the measure on an excellent sociality
everything that is eccentric, inelastic, intemperate; it is
Voltaire holding up to the measure of the intelligence

221

222 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

the forces of darkness and superstition : it is a criticism
of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as
the spirit is embodied in them, dictated by some power-
ful, personal and supremely conscious reaction against
that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain cannot be called
a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he did
undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society
and government his stories and articles present," says
Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly speaking, truthfully
characteristic of the state of society and government we
find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless
civil community in the world. What is exceptional in
our great humorist's view of our national life is not the
ruffianism of the existence he describes for us on the
Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the
fact that he writes the truth about it. ' ' Who will deny
that this is so ? Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some
of the facts, of our social life, he satirizes them vehe-
mently. But when it comes to the spirit of our social
life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own
humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie
that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies
and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict
the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons
at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else
begin.' '

It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his
nerve." It ought to be sufficiently clear by this time,
however, that he did not lose his nerve, simply because,
in reality, he had never found it. He had never, despite
Mr. Ho wells, "come into his intellectual consciousness"
at all, he had never come into the consciousness of any
ideal that could stand for him as a measure of the so-
ciety about him. Moreover, he had so involved himself
in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that
he could not strike out in any direction without wound-
ing his wife or his friends, without contravening some

Let Somebody Else Begin 223

loyalty that had become sacred to him, without destroy-
ing the very basis of his happiness. We have seen that
he had never risen to the conception of literature as a
great impersonal social instrument. An irresponsible
child himself, he could not even feel that he had a right
to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the wishes of
those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently,
instead of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly
acquiesced in it and even flattered it.

If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain
was intended to be a sort of American Rabelais who
would have done, as regards the puritanical commer-
cialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author
of ' * Pantagruel " did as regards the obsolescent me-
dievalism of sixteenth-century France. Heading his
books and his life one seems to divine his proper char-
acter and career embedded in the life of his generation
as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric
clay-bank: many of the vertebras are missing, other
parts have crumbled away, we cannot with final cer-
tainty identify the portentous creature. But the di-
mensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major mem-
bers are beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified
from the evidence in assuming what sort of being we
have before us, and our imagination fills out in detail
what its appearance must, or rather would, have been.

When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns
and anecdotes, the small change as it were of his literary
life, had for their butt the petty aspects of the tribal
morality of America — Sabbath-breaking, the taboos of
the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac,
we can see that his birthright was of our age rather
than of his own. Hear what he says of "the late Ben-
jamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity
toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a sin-
gle natural instinct without tumbling over some of those
everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on

224 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his
father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my
son, "A groat a day's a penny a year," ' and the com-
fort is all gone out of those peanuts." He delights in
turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such
forms as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you
can do day after to-morrow, just as well." Here we
have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who is not so much
at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as
impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a
certain house at night and describes the books he finds
piled on the parlor table: "One was 'Pilgrim's Pro-
gress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't say
why. I read considerable in it now and then. The
statements was interesting, but tough." And again,
speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle Silas he asked a
pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and
it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them
kind of interruptions do lots of times." One may say
that a man in whom the continuity of racial experience
is cut as sharply as these passages indicate it was cut in
Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior cyni-
cism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man
is the satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself
quickly, if he can substitute a new and personal ideal
for the racial ideal he has abandoned, that solution of
continuity is the making of him. For Mark Twain this
was impossible. I have already given many instances
of his instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time,
moral, religious, political, economic. "My idea of our
civilization," he said, freely, in private, "is that it is
a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arro-
gancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I
hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie ; and as for the
thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs."
And consider this grave conclusion in one of his later
letters: "Well, the 19th century made progress — the

Let Somebody Else Begin 225

first progress in 'ages and ages' — colossal progress. In
what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were
made in things which add to the comfort of many and
make life harder for as many more. But the addition
to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not.
The materialities were not invented in the interest of
righteousness; that there is more righteousness in the
world because of them than there was before, is hardly
demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there
is a vast change (due to them) in ideals — do you admire
it? All Europe and all America are feverishly scram-
bling for money. Money is the supreme ideal — all others
take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations
named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the
history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness,
until your time and mine. This lust has rotted these
nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dis-
honest, oppressive. ' ' Who can fail to see that the whole
tendency of Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter
to the spirit of his age, that he belonged as naturally
in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the great Euro-
pean writers of his time? Can we not also see, accord-
ingly, that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child,
his wife and his friends were the unconscious agents of
the business regime, bent upon deflecting and restrain-
ing a force which, if it had matured, would have
seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial
pioneering ?

Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore,
Mark Twain was perpetually driven back by the innu-
merable obligations he had assumed into the role that
gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what
did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody
work in this country some of these days when the lazy
canaille get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre
and Fouquier-Tinville, " we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich
writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was

226 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

the attitude of Mark Twain's intimates toward social
and economic questions: the literary confraternity of
the generation was almost a solid block behind the finan-
cial confraternity. In the moral and religious depart-
ments the path of the candidate for gentility was no
less strait and narrow. "It took a brave man before
the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had
read ' The Age of Keason ' " : Mark Twain observed once
that he had read it as a cub pilot "with fear and hesi-
tation. " A man whose life had been staked on the
pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in
those days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark
Twain to the end. In 1880 or thereabouts he saw his
brother Orion, in the Middle West, excommunicated,
after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to
eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian
Church. "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer"
were constantly being suppressed as immoral by the
public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but
in great centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in
godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. If the morals of those
boys were considered heretical, what would have been
thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the
title he suggested for his first important book — "The
New Pilgrim's Progress" — was regarded in Hartford
as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing
Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it,
and it was only when the money-charmer Bliss threat-
ened to resign if he was not allowed to publish the
book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy,
but loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave
in. It was these same gentlemen who later became Mark
Twain's neighbors and daily associates: it was with
them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose
"community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the
loyal Mr. Paine is obliged to dwell in his biography.
Was Mark Twain to be expected to attack them?

Let Somebody Else Begin 227

His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle
years of his life : it is only in his early work, and only
in his minor work, his "Sketches," that we find, smug-
gled in as it were among so many other notes, the frank
note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had
made, as a sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-
in-law 's loan, to the readers of his Buffalo paper: "I
only want to assure parties having a friendly interest
in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to
hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any
time. I am not going to introduce any startling re-
forms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble.' ' He,
that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that
he could not be too circumspect. And yet among those
early sketches a risky note now and then intrudes itself :
"A Mysterious Visit," for example, that very telling
animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of
the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored
and courted men" lie about their income to the tax-
collector "every year." Is it not the case, however,
that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow
not noticing these little spots on the American sun?

In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only
novel, he seems frank enough. One remembers the
preface of that book : "It will be seen that it deals with
an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief embar-
rassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination
has been the want of illustration. In a state where there
is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden
wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and con-
tented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where
society is in a condition of primitive purity, and politics
is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic,
there are necessarily no materials for such a history as
we have constructed out of an ideal commonwealth."
That is fairly explicit and fairly animated, even if it
is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact the

228 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

whole background of the story, from the capital city,
that " grand old benevolent national asylum for the
Helpless," down, with its devasting irony about every
American institution save family life — Congress, the
law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education and
the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us
for Mark Twain's final verdict regarding the "Bless-
ings-of -Civilization Trust." And yet the total effect of
the book is idyllic ; the mirage of the America Myth lies
over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit him-
self a certain number of acid glances at the actual face
of reality; but he had to redeem himself, he wished to
redeem himself for doing so — for the story was written
to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford —
by making the main thread the happy domestic tale of
a well brought up young man who finds in this very
stubbly field the amplest and the softest straw for the
snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, for
that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he
had not had the moral support of the collaboration of
Charles Dudley Warner? "Clemens," we are told,
"had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been
unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction
alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the
proposition of joint authorship." Mark Twain, the
darling of the masses, brought Warner a return in
money such as he probably never experienced again in
his life; Warner, the respected Connecticut man of
letters, gave Mark Twain the sanction of his name. An
admirable combination! A model indeed, one might
have thought it, for all New Englanders in their deal-
ings with the West.

Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be
taken for an accident? In any case, it was not until
that latter period when he was too old and too secure
in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this earlier
way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Cor-

Let Somebody Else Begin 229

rupted Hadleyburg" — not till then, and then only in a
measure did he ever again, openly and on a large scale,
attack the spiritual integrity of industrial America.
Occasionally, in some little sketch like ' ' The Great Revo-
lution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is
described as "a doubtful acquisition, ' ' he ventures a
pinprick in the dark; and we know that he sent his
"1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had
once remarked, "0 that we had a Rabelais I": "I
judged," said Mark Twain, "that I could furnish him
one." But he had had his fingers burnt too often:
he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, there-
fore, that having begun with contemporary society in
"The Gilded Age," he travels backward into the past
for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes : he feels free
to express his social indignation only in terms of the
seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yan-
kee," the fifteenth century England of "The Prince
and the Pauper," the fourteenth century France of
"Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The
Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one
observes, and never again the present, for the first of
these books alone contains anything like a contemporary
social implication and that, the implication of the "Con-
necticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am ex-
aggerating. Mark Twain does attack the present in the
persons of the Czar and King Leopold, whom all good
Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on corruption
in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was
he not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the
leading citizens who are always ready to back the right
sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine 's biography: you
will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew,
begging Saint Mark for permission to print and dis-
tribute in proper form that "sacred message" about
the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to estimate
the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right,"

230 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

he notes, in his private memoranda — "do right and you
will be conspicuous. ' '

Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance,
of Mark Twain 's intention and failure in his predestined
role, the "Connecticut Yankee" itself. This was his
largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the most
ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of
his works. Nothing could be more illuminating than
a glance at his motives in writing it.

What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive?
"The book," he says, in a letter to his English pub-
lisher, "was not written for America; it was written
for England. So many Englishmen have done their
sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment
that it seems to me high time that some of us should
substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry
up the English nation to a little higher level of man-
hood in turn."

No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold
blood he would have blushed for his own momentary
priggishness ; it was not characteristic of him to talk
about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a
pet. Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us,
with many deprecating gestures of those superangelic
hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always have been
slightly irritating — he was irritating even at home, and
how much more irritating when, having visited this coun-
try, he chose to dwell upon the rudimentary language
of General Grant ! Mark Twain saw red. An animad-
version upon General Grant's grammar was an attack
upon General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was
an attack upon America, an attack upon America and
upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark Twain,
upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his
pocket-book as the publisher of General Grant, upon
his amour-propre as the countryman of General Grant.
The pioneer in him rose to the assault like a bull-buffalo

Let Somebody Else Begin 231

in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a
typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and
said, "You're another!" — just as he did a few years
later in his reply to Paul Bourget. Then, longing for
1 ' a pen warmed-up in hell, ' ' he set to work to put those
redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General
Cornwallis and all the rest of them, for by this time
he was in the full furore of the myth of the American
Revolution, in their place. He even began a frantic
defense of American newspapers, which at other times
he could not revile enough, and filled his note-books
with red-hot absurdities like this: "Show me a lord and
I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a
journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who,
in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior."
In short, he covered both shoulders with chips and
defied any and every Englishman, the whole English
race, indeed, to come and knock them off.

Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark
Twain 's failure as a satirist. In the moment of crisis
the individual in him loses itself in the herd; the intel-
lect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him,
unconsciously, into a sort of bouleversement of all his
actual personal intentions. Against his instinct, against
his purpose he finds himself doing, not the thing he
really desires to do, i. e., to pry up the American nation,
if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher level of
manhood," which is the true office of an American
satirist, but to flatter the American nation and lull its
conscience to sleep. In short, instead of doing the
unpopular thing, which he really wanted to do, he does
the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee
mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with
glory, and pours ridicule upon the two things that least
needed ridicule for the good of the Yankee mechanic's
soul, if only because in his eyes they were sufficiently
ridiculous already — England and the Middle Ages.

232 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of
Mark Twain's genius? If any country ever needed
satire it is, and was, America. Did not Mark Twain
feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle
years when he saw things truly with his own eyes?
Let us take from his letters a comment on American
society that proves it: ''There was absolutely nothing
in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can
see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were:
BY TELEGRAPH— A Father Killed by His Son, A
Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old Mur-
derer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court
House Fired and Three Negroes Therein Shot While
Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to Three Hun-
dred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana
(and thirty other similar headings). The items under
those headings all bear date yesterday, April 16 (refer
to your own paper) — and I give you my word of honor
that that string of commonplace stuff was everything
there was in the telegraphic columns that a body could
call news. Well, said I to myself, this is getting pretty
dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don't appear to
be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive
nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the sig-
nificance of Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the
tone of these final comments that he already considers
it none of his business, that as a writer he proposes
to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide
open to those things! Would not any one say, there-
fore, that there is something rather singular in the
spectacle of a human being living alertly in a land
where such incidents were the staple of news and yet
being possessed with an exclusive public passion to ' ' pry
the English nation up to a little higher level of man-
hood ' ' ? Isn 't it strange to see the inhabitant of a coun-
try where negroes were being lynched at an average
rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of

Let Somebody Else Begin 233

righteous wrath, " as Mr. Paine says, because people
were unjustly hanged in the seventh century? Mark
Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about
that. But isn 't it curious how automatically his anger
was deflected from all its natural and immediate objects,
from all those objects it might have altered, and
turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of
space itself? "Perhaps/' he says, in "What Is Man?"
defining what he calls the master passion, the
hunger for self -approval, "perhaps there is something
that (man) loves more than he loves peace — the ap-
proval of his neighbors and the public. And per-
haps there is something which he dreads more than
he dreads pain — the disapproval of his neighbors and
the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it
too. He avoided the disapproval of his neighbors by
not attacking America ; he won their approval by attack-
ing England. Then, as we can see from his famous
letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval
of England also by deprecating the opinion of culti-
vated readers and saying that he only wanted to be
taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried,
in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the
cultivated classes. . . . And I never had any ambition
in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game —
the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct
them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for
they can get instruction elsewhere." That was what
became of his noble purpose to "pry up the English
nation" when the English nation manifested its objec-
tion to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book.
The wiles of simple folk! They are the most successful
of all.

The ironical part of this story — for it is worth pur-
suing— is that Mark Twain, the sober individual, had
for England an exaggerated affection and admiration.
His "first hour in England was an hour of delight,"

234 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

he records; "of rapture and eestacy." "I would a
good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you
over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. Paine adds
that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its
institutions" — its institutions, observe — "its fair rural
aspects, he had found in it only delight." That was
true to the end of his days ; against a powerful instinct
he defended even the Boer War because he so admired
the genius of English administration. He had personal
reasons for this, indeed, in the affection with which
England always welcomed him. ' ' On no occasion in his
own country," we are told, of his first English lecture
tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and
how many of those triumphs there were! "As a rule,"
says Mr. Paine, "English readers of culture, critical
readers, rose to an understanding of Mark Twain's
literary value with greater promptness than did the
same class of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr.
Howells, "it was in England that Mark Twain was
first made to feel that he had come into his rightful
heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from
this? Who can say? But certainly it was intense and
profound. Early in his life he planned, as we have
seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was
afraid its inevitable humor would "offend those who
had taken him into their hearts and homes." Why,
then, safely enthroned in America, did he, merely be-
cause he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so pas-
sionately desire to "pry" the English nation up? One
key to this question we have already found, but it
requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of this
earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives,
and it was this, as I have said, that made him the typical
pioneer, were purely personal. Emerson wrote his
"English Traits" before the Civil War: in reporting
his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made
a remark that could not fail to hurt the feelings of

Let Somebody Else Begin 235

Robert Southey. What was his reason, what was his
excuse? That Southey and Landor were public figures
and that their values were values of public importance.
Emerson, in short, instinctively regarded his function,
his loyalties and his responsibilities as those of the man
of letters, the servant of humanity. Mark Twain, no
less typical of his own half-century, took with him to
England the pioneer system of values in which every-
thing was measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If
he couldn't write without hurting people's feelings, he
wouldn't write at all, for always, like the good West-
erner, he thought of his audience as the group of people
immediately surrounding him. In America, on the
other hand, the situation was precisely reversed. What
would please his Hartford neighbors, who had taken
him into their hearts and homes? — that was the point
now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them,
could not see England, through the eyes of a Con-
necticut Yankee, damned enough! Something, Mark
Twain knew, he wanted to satirize — he was boiling with
satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished
to satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him
wished to satirize not America but England. And as
usual the pioneer won.

Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had
published," Mr. Paine tells us, "nothing since the
'Huck Finn' story, and his company was badly in
need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also,
it was highly desirable to earn money for himself."
Elsewhere we read that the "Connecticut Yankee"
"was a book badly needed by his publishing business
with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark
Twain, the author, we see, had to serve the prestige
and profit of Mark Twain, the publisher ; he was obliged,
in short, to write something that would be popular with
the American masses. How happy that publisher must
have been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered

236 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

him! Mark Twain, on the top-wave of his own capital-
istic undertakings, was simply expressing the exuber-
ance of his own character not as an artist but as an
industrial pioneer in the person of that East Hartford
Yankee who sets out to make King Arthur's England
a "going concern.' ' Who can mistake this animus? —
1 ' Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge,
brains, pluck and enterprise to sail in and grow up with
the country. The grandest field that ever was; and
all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the English
nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of
patting the American nation on the back. The satirist
has joined forces with the great popular flood of his
generation; he has become that flood; he asks neither
the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only
that he wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment,
the artist in Mark Twain had had only the tail of one
eye awake, he would have laughed at the spectacle of
himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the mag-
nificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what
everybody else, less nobly perhaps, but no less patriot-
ically, was defending also.

"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only
the young can afford it." Precisely at the moment
when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that remark-
able letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism
comparable only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a
man who has been too long deprived of his normal
ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom Saw-
yer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It
will only be read by adults. It is only written for
adults." Six months later we find him adding: "I
finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down
to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of
satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls. ' ' Tell
the truth or trump — but get the trick!

Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar

Let Somebody Else Begin 237

with the normal processes of the literary mind, was
Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, that fear which
was the complement of his prevailing desire for success
and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to
write two letters, one of which he suppressed, when he
was addressing any one who was not an intimate friend
upon any subject about which his instinctive feelings
clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters
in which, as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go
merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual
balance," accumulated in such a remarkable way that
finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain
for his own amusement wrote an introduction to the
collection. "Will anybody contend," he says, "that a
man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and
be obeyed ? . . . He is not to mail this letter ; he under-
stands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume
of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only writing it
to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano ; imagin-
ing himself erupting does no good; he must open up
his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge
of lava if he would get relief. . . . Sometimes the load
is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three
letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very
angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one
with hot embers in it here and there."

Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is,
he does not even ask himself whether he is doing right
or wrong, so unquestioningly has he accepted the code
of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the
priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted,
like the accumulated steam from an engine whose
machinery has broken down and cannot employ it.

Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of
lava boiled up in Mark Twain ; compare the two unsent
messages he wrote and the message he finally sent to
Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to

238 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

dine with the Eussian emissaries to the Portsmouth Con-
ference in 1905. To understand them we must recall
Mark Twain's opinion that the premature end of the
Russo-Japanese War was " entitled to rank as the most
conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as
he did, that if the war had lasted a month longer the
Eussian autocracy would have fallen, he was bitterly
opposed to the conference that had been arranged by
Eoosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send :

To Colonel Harvey. — I am still a cripple, otherwise I should
be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious
magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated and abol-
ished every high achievement of the Japanese sword and turned
the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome com-
edy. If I may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as
my fellow-humorists, I taking third place, as becomes one who
was not born to modesty, but by diligence and hard work is
acquiring it. Mark.

Dear Colonel — No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge
of sorrow send for me. Mark.

And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count
Witte so much that he announced he was going to show
it to the Czar:

To Colonel Harvey. — I am still a cripple, otherwise I should
be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious
magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, and
with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. It is
fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done
admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as
impossible and achieved it. Mark Twain.

Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer,' '
a bitterly powerful fragment of concentrated satire.
Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To Dan Beard,
who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War
Prayer,' stating that he had read it to his daughter
Jean, and others, who had told him he must not print
it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. ' Still you are

Let Somebody Else Begin 239

going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up
and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers,
shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole
truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in
this world. It can be published after I am dead.' He
did not care/' adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public
verdict that he was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with
a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and
conclusions of mankind.' ' The conclusions of mankind!
And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William
James! There was nothing in this prayer that any
European writer would have hesitated for a moment to
print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this
incorrigible playboy, who wTas always ready to blow
thirty or forty thousand dollars up the chimney of some
new mechanical invention. "I have a family to support,
and I can't afford this kind of dissipation."

Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky
dinner. Mark Twain was always solicitous for the Kus-
sian people; he wrote stinging rebukes to the Czar,
rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with
a far more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great
revolution in Russia; he was always ready to work for
it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to America
to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly
offered his aid. Presently, however, it became known
that Gorky had brought with him a woman without
benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious
wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway,
turned them into the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate
even for a moment ? Did anything stir in his conscience ?
Did it occur to him that great fame and position carry
with them a certain obligation, that it is the business
of leaders to prevent great public issues from being
swamped in petty, personal ones ? Apparently not. The
authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, was
hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned.

240 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

"An army of reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing
Clemens and Howells," who appear on that page for all
the world like a pair of terrified children. "The Rus-
sian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more
lively, more intimate domestic interest. " What was
Mark Twain's own comment on the affair? "Laws," he
wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and
punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom
brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair,
unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will
be inflicted just the same. . . . The efforts which have
been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all
respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back
of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Custom
is custom ; it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite ; facts,
reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than
the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would
Emerson or Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of
such an argument, such an assertion of the futility of
the individual reason in the face of "brass, boiler-iron,
granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most
pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous
writer.

This is what became of the great American satirist,
the Voltaire, the Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age.
If the real prophet is he who attacks the stultifying
illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other hand, makes
one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what
everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult
evils of society Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He
attacked monarchy, yes; but monarchy was already an
obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who took
such delight in * l walking with kings, ' ' as the advertise-
ments say, in actual life, never attacked the one monarch
who really was, as it appeared, secure in his seat, the
Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, as he . said, it
was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the

Let Somebody Else Begin 241

nation.' ' He had become, in fact, the incarnation of
that numerical mass, the majority, which, in the face
of all his personal impulses, he could not consider as
anything but invariably right. He could not be the
spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as
Carlyle had been, for he knew them not; he could not
be, like Anatole France, the spokesman of justice, for
indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was personal,
and that was determined by his friends. "On the
whole," as Mr. Paine says, "Clemens wrote his stric-
tures more for relief than to print/ ' and when he
printed them it was because he had public opinion
behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased
to revolt, he was the same man who, at the psychological
moment, in "The Innocents Abroad," by disparaging
Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by disparag-
ing, in short, the history of the human spirit, had
flattered the expanding impulse of industrial America.
In the face of his own genius, in the face of his own
essential desire, he had pampered for a whole genera-
tion that national self-complacency which Matthew
Arnold quite accurately described as vulgar, and not
only vulgar but retarding.

Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he
wrote in his old age, those fragments which he rever
published, which he never even cared to finish, but a
few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine 's biog-
raphy. We note in them all the gestures of the great
unfulfilled satirist he was meant to be; but they are
empty gestures; only an impotent anger informs them;
Mark Twain's preoccupations are those merely of a
bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take ven-
geance upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom
his wife has obliged him to pay homage; but the
Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer interests
humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions
of his childhood in Missouri; he has never even read

242 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

"Literature and Dogma "; he does not know that the
morbid fears of that old Western village of his have
ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world;
he imagines that he can still horrify us with his anti-
quated blasphemies. He has lived completely insulated
from all the real currents of thought in his generation.
"The human being,' ' he says, in one of his notes, "needs
to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scien-
tists have done it already, but most of them don't care
to say so." He imagines, we see, that all the scientists
have, like himself, lived in Hartford and Elmira and
married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according
to Mr. Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or
tell him anything, he never, dazzled as he was by his
own fame, discovered his mistake. ' ( The religious folly
you were born in you will die in." he wrote once: he
meant that he had never himself faced anything out.
Was he, or wasn 't he, a Presbyterian ? He really never
knew. If he had matured, those theological preoccupa-
tions, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes
about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply
dropped away from his mind: his inability to express
them had fixed them there and his environment kept him
constantly reacting against them to the end. Think of
those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were
"going to make people's hair curl." Several of them,
at least, we are told, dealt with infant damnation; but
whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to curl
over infant damnation ? How little he had observed the
real changes in public opinion, this man who lived,
instinctively, all his life long, in the atmosphere of the
Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells Mr.
Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will
get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if they venture to
print it this side of A. D. 2006 — which I judge they
won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment of the
orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A. D.

Let Somebody Else Begin 243

2006," saying that it would "make a stir when it comes
out," and even went so far, as we have seen, as to
negotiate for the publication of his memoirs one hun-
dred years after his death. He might have spared him-
self the trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those
memoirs will seem to the publishing world a very doubt-
ful commercial risk.

Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudi-
mentary. He considered life a mistake and the human
animal the contemptible machine he had found him:
that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the
depth and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues
little else. The absurdity of man consisted, in Mark
Twain '3 eyes, in his ridiculous conception of heaven and
his conceit in believing himself the Creator's pet. But
surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His
heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing,
grotesque," he wrote in one of those pseudo-Swiftian
"Letters from the Earth," which he dictated with such
fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not
a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists
— utterly and entirely — of diversions which he cares
next to nothing about here on the earth, yet he is quite
sure he will like in heaven. . . . Most men do not sing,
most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where
others are singing if it be continued more than two
hours. Note that. Only about two men in a hundred
can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a
hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down.
Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. . . .
All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their
lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you
have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. "Well,
they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all
by themselves ; guess what it is like ? ' ' How far does that
satirical gesture carry us? It is too rustically simple
in its animus, and its presuppositions about the tastes

244 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and
to pray, in some fashion or other, are universal, admir-
able and permanent impulses in man. "What is the
moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of * ' Huckleberry
Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful
error, something that stands in the way of life and
thwarts it as the civilization of the Gilded Age had
thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the illusion, or the
disillusion, of a man who has never really known what
civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant,' '
like H. G. "Wells in his early tales, delights in the spec-
tacle of a general smash-up of a world which he cannot
imagine as worth saving because he has only seen it
as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The
Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg ' ' ? "That every man
is strong," as Mr. Paine says, "until his price is
named." But that is not true, to the discriminating
sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the
Connecticut Yankee collects in order to start the Eng-
lish republic: in childhood, and childhood alone, in
short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted
nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested develop-
ment, the victim of a social order which had given him
no general sense of the facts of life and no sense what-
ever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol promiscuously
over the whole human scene. But that is not satire:
that is pathology.

Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye,
in later life, was always looking through the small end
or the large end of a telescope ; he oscillated between the
posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture of Gul-
liver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a
magnification or a minification of things human is one
of the ear-marks of the satirist. In order to be effectual,
however, it requires a measure, an ideal norm, which
Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion,
never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an

Let Somebody Else Begin 245

artistic sense also that led him to suppress, and indeed
to leave incomplete, most of the works in which this
tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000
Years Among the Microbes, " passages of which have
been published by Mr. Paine. Glance at another ex-
ample. "I have imagined/ ' he said once, "a man three
thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and
looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be
about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it
over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where
he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say,
1 There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I
can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth
to look at. ' " There we have the Swif tian, the Rabelais-
ian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the picture that
fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is
able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express
a simple contempt, to rule human life as it were out of
court. Mark Twain never completed these fancies pre-
cisely, one can only suppose, because they invariably
led into this cul-de-sac. If life is really futile, then
writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile
he may make life seem, never really believes it futile:
his interest in its futility is itself a desperate registra-
tion of some instinctive belief that it might be, that it
could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it is full of
significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-
present sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark
Twain had never attained: in consequence, his satirical
gestures remained mere passes in the air.

CHAPTER XI

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 dis-
torted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitter-
ness of his defeat.

1 ' 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 indis-
pensable condition of the creative life. As for the life
of literature, it had been for him, and he assumed that

246

Mustered Out 247

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 al-
ways unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic naivete
of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a
thought or a phrase because it annoyed some rich busi-
ness man, some influential priest, some foolish woman?
What were their flagellations, their gross and petty pun-
ishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, imma-
terial 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 frus-
trated 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 chal-
lenge 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 "1 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, escap-
ing from an unusually long and disagreeable session

248 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

with Aunt Polly — that is the posture of Mark Twain,
seventy years young, in this moment of release, of re-
lief, 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 role in any distinguished
way? Was he really the seer, the clairvoyant public
counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain per-
spective 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 primi-2
tive 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

Mustered Out 249

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."

1 ' 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, anony-
mously; 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 slum-
bered 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

250 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 want-
ing 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, delu-
sions : 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 unimagin-
able 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 cate-

Mustered Out 251

gorical imperative, a path out of what was for him a
life of sin. "With all my practice," he writes, humor-
ously, 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 con-
tempt 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 mo-
ment was himself attempting to write "an absolutely
faithful autobiography, ' ' as Mr. Paine tells us, "a docu-
ment 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,"

252 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 unallow-
able 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 birth-
day. 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 con-
tinue 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 pub-
lished 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

Mustered Out 253

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 "affec-
tionate 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, how-
ever 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

254 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 super-
ficial 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 impor-
tance 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 abso-

Mustered Out 255

lute 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 inter-
ested to finish it. He thought of founding a School of
Philosophy at Redding like that other school at Con-
cord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious
1 ' 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 prob-
ably have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfor-
tunately, the book was received, says Mr. Paine, "as
a clever, and even brilliant, expose 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 role 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 Ports-

256 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

mouth 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: "unspeak-
able 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 suffer-
ing 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 pas-
sion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic
attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those
pages in "Following the Equator" about the exploita-
tion of the Kanakas. Then there was his book about
King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Solilo-
quy," 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

Mustered Out 257

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
Juares 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 exclu-
sively in attacks of one kind or another. His mind,
whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly destruc-
tive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to
abolish, a will to destroy: " sometimes, ' ' he had writ-
ten, 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 con-
sumed 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

258 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 him-
self.

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 Wag-
ner'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 be-
fore ! He, the unconscious sycophant of the crass mate-
rialism 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 evolu-

Mustered Out 259

tion of a man who, in the end, wishes to destroy himself
and the world. How angrily suspicions he is, even thus
early, of all aesthetic 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-notf-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 ratio-
cination could have so misapprehended the nature and

260 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 certi-
tude, 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 Shake-
speare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates
nothing had not had for him a tragic, however uncon-
scious, 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

Mustered Out 261

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 influ-
ences of a myriad of stimulating exterior circum-
stances." 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 conscious-
ness" 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 train-
ing". . . . 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 influ-

262 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

ences, outside circumstances, wind the man and regu-
late 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 hav-
ing none, and delights in denying the possibility of
independence just because he does not possess it him-
self. 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 per-
ceive, 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

Mustered Out 263

the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was
"Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply per-
suadable," 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 train-
ing. ... 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 appre-
hends 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 auto-
matic machines which act unconsciously. From morn-
ing 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

264 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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 twd hours to merely name the multitude of things
my mind tallied .off and photographed in fifteen min-
utes. " 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 ban-
ish, 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 dis-
sociated fragments of personality, an utterly disinte-
grated 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 per-
sonalities at war with each other. One is the refractory
self that wants to publish the book regardless of conse-
quences; 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 enter-
prise: 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

Mustered Out 265

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 sig-
nificance, 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 Jabout 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 plat-

266 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

form 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 biog-
raphy, 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-role of the general man-
ager 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 re-
leased 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 cos-
tume 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

Mustered Out 267

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 con-
science, 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 confreres have played in the human
drama of other times and other peoples, and ask your-
selves whether the hour has not come to put away child-
ish things and walk the stage as poets do.

DATE DUE

■

CAT NO 1137

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY