The Ordeal of Mark Twain Part 10

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 cert.i.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 a.s.serted that man is a chameleon and is nothing but what his training makes him had long lost the intuition of the poet and believed perforce that without Bacon's training those plays could not have been written.

But would he have stamped with such a savage joy upon that yokel Shakespeare if the fact, as he imagined, that man creates nothing had not had for him a tragic, however unconscious, significance? One can hardly doubt that when one considers that Mark Twain was never able to follow the Bacon ciphers, when one considers the emotional prepossession revealed in his own statement that he accepted those ciphers mainly on faith.

How simple it becomes now, the unraveling of that mournful philosophy of his, that drab ma.s.s 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, ent.i.tled to no demerit for what he has failed to do! "Dahomey," he says, somewhere, "could not find an Edison out; in Dahomey an Edison could not find himself out. Broadly speaking, genius is not born with sight but blind; and it is not itself that opens its eyes, but the subtle influences of a myriad of stimulating exterior circ.u.mstances." What a comment, side by side with Mark Twain's life, upon Mr. Howells's statement that the world in which he "came into his intellectual consciousness" was "large and free and safe"--large, for the satirist, with Mrs. Clemens, free with Mr. Howells himself, and safe with H.H. Rogers! "If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no outside material to work with, and could have invented none; and no outside influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations of a valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing. In Turkey he would have produced something--something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences, a.s.sociations and training. In France he would have produced something better--something up to the highest limit of the French influences and training".... Mark Twain fails to mention what would have happened to Shakespeare if he had been born in America. He merely adds, but it is enough: "You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobelins." There we have his half-conscious verdict on the destiny of the artist in a society as "large and free and safe" as that of the Gilded Age.

Yes, the tragic thing about an environment as coercive as ours is that we are obliged to endow it with the majesty of destiny itself in order to save our own faces! We dwell on the conditions that hamper us, destroy us, we embrace them with an _amor fati_, to escape from the contemplation of our own destruction. "Outside influences, outside circ.u.mstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would not be valuable." There is the complete philosophy of the moral slave who not only has no autonomy but wishes to have none, who, in fact, finds all his comfort in having none, and delights in denying the possibility of independence just because he does not possess it himself.

The pragmatists have escaped this net in their own interestingly temperamental fashion, like flying-fish, by jumping over it. It remains, nevertheless, the characteristic philosophy of Americans who have a deep emotional stake in the human situation; and one might almost say that it honors Mark Twain. We only perceive, we are only mortified by the slavery of men, when nature has endowed us with the true hunger and thirst for freedom.

Who can doubt, indeed, that it was the very greatness of his potential force, the strength of his instinctive preferences, that confirmed in Mark Twain his inborn Calvinistic will-to-despise human nature, that fixed in him the obsession of the miscarriage of the human spirit? If the great artist is the freest man, if the true creative life is, in fact, the embodiment of "free will," then it is only he that is born for greatness who can feel, as Mark Twain felt, that the universe is leagued against him. The common man has no sense of having surrendered his will: he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a will to surrender. He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose regardless of his moral destiny: to possess no principle of growth, no spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest advantage in a world where success is the reward of accommodation. It is nothing to him that man is a "chameleon" who "by the law of his nature takes the color of his place of resort"; it is nothing to him whether or not, as Mark Twain said, the first command the Deity issued to a human being on this planet was "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable," knowing that Adam would never be able to disobey. It is nothing to him, or rather it is much: for it is by this means that he wins his worldly prestige. How well, for that matter, it served the prevailing self in Mark Twain!

"From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human being is under training. It is his human environment which influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval he most values.... The influences about him create his preferences, his aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He creates none of these things for himself." Poor Mark Twain! That is the way of common flesh. But only the great spirit so fully apprehends the tragedy of it.

Nothing, consequently, could be more pathetic than the picture Mark Twain draws, in "What Is Man?" and in his later memoranda, of the human mind. It is really his own mind he is describing, and one cannot imagine anything more unlike the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a single flood, all poise, all natural control. "You cannot keep your mind from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.... The mind carries on thought on its own hook.... We are automatic machines which act unconsciously. From morning till sleeping-time, all day long. All day long our machinery is doing things from habit and instinct, and without requiring any help or attention from our poor little 7-by-9 thinking apparatus".... Man "has habits, and his habits will act before his thinking apparatus can get a chance to exert its powers." Mark Twain cannot even conceive of the individual reacting, as the mature man, as the artist preeminently, does, upon his instinctive life and controlling it for his own ends. He shows us the works of his mental machine "racing along from subject to subject--a drifting panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name the mult.i.tude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen minutes." The mind?--man "has no control over it; it does as it pleases.

It will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It is entirely independent of him." Does he call himself a machine? He might better have said a merry-go-round, without the rhythm of a merry-go-round. Mark Twain reveals himself in old age as a prey to all manner of tumbling, chaotic obsessions; his mind rings with rhymes he cannot banish, sticks and stumbles over chess-problems he has no desire to solve: "it wouldn't listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and wretched in the morning." A swarming ma.s.s of dissociated fragments of personality, an utterly disintegrated spirit, a spirit that has lost, that has never possessed, the principle of its own growth. Always, in these speculations, however, we find two major personalities at war with each other. One is the refractory self that wants to publish the book regardless of consequences; the other is the "insolent absolute Monarch inside of a man who is the man's master" and who forbids it. The eternal conflict of Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Polly playing itself out to the end in the theater of Mark Twain's soul!

The interpretation of dreams is a very perilous enterprise: contemporary psychology hardly-permits us to venture into it with absolute a.s.surance.

And yet we feel that without doubt our unconscious selves express through this distorting medium their hidden desires and fears. "I generally enjoy my dreams," Mark Twain once told Mr. Paine, "but not those three, and they are the ones I have oftenest." He wrote out these "three recurrent dreams" in a memorandum: one of them is long and, to me at least, without obvious significance, but one cannot fail to see in the other two a singular corroboration of the view of Mark Twain's life that has been unfolded in these pages.

"There is never a month pa.s.ses," he wrote, "that I do not dream of being in reduced circ.u.mstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about those days; but there's always something sickening about the thought that I have been obliged to go back to them; and usually in my dream I am just about to start into a black shadow without being able to tell whether it is Selma Bluff, or Hat Island, or only a black wall of night.

"Another dream that I have of that kind is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. I hate that dream worse than the other. In it I am always getting up before an audience with nothing to say, trying to be funny; trying to make the audience laugh, realizing that I am only making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing there in the semi-darkness talking to an empty house."

I leave my readers to expound these dreams according to the formulas that please them best. I wish to note only two or three points. Mark Twain is obsessed with the idea of going back to the river: "I love to think about those days." But there is something sickening in the thought of returning to them, too, and that is because of the "black shadow,"

the "black wall of night," into which he, the pilot, sees himself inevitably steering. That is a precise image of his life; the second dream is its natural complement. On the lecture platform his prevailing self had "revelled" in its triumphs, and, he says, "I hate that dream worse than the other." Had he ever wished to be a humorist? He is always "trying to make the audience laugh"; the horror of it is that he has lost, in his nightmare, the approval for which he had made his great surrender.

Turn, again, to the last pages in Mr. Paine's biography, to the moment when he lay breathing out his life in the cabin of that little Bermuda packet:

"Two dreams beset him in his momentary slumber--one of a play in which the t.i.tle-role of the general manager was always unfilled. He spoke of this now and then when it had pa.s.sed, and it seemed to amuse him. The other was a discomfort: a college a.s.sembly was attempting to confer upon him some degree which he did not want. Once, half roused, he looked at me searchingly and asked: 'Isn't there something I can resign and be out of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don't want it.' Then, realizing, he said: 'I am like a bird in a cage: always expecting to get out, and always beaten back by the wires.'"

No, Mark Twain's seventieth birthday had not released him: it would have had to release him from himself! It cut away the cords that bound him; but the tree was not flexible any more, it was old and rigid, fixed for good and all; it could not redress the balance. In one pathetic excess alone the artist blossomed: that costume of white flannels, the temerity of which so shocked Mr. Howells in Washington. "I should like," said Mark Twain, "to dress in a loose and flowing costume made all of silks and velvets resplendent with stunning dyes. So would every man I have ever known; but none of us dares to venture it." There speaks the born artist, the starved artist who for forty years has had to pretend that he was a business man, the born artist who has always wanted to be "original" in his dress and has had to submit to a feverish censorship even over his neckties--the artist who, longing to look like an orchid, has the courage at last and at least to emulate the modest lily!

And so we see Mark Twain, with his "dry and dusty" heart, "washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making," the saddest, the most ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent. The king, the conquering hero, the darling of the ma.s.ses, 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 G.o.d, we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." He is the typical American, people have said: let heaven draw its own conclusions. As for ourselves, we are permitted to think otherwise. He was the supreme victim of an epoch in American history, an epoch that has closed. Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for missing his vocation? "He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative," says John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, "who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the end of any phase of our experience, and often when its seeming stability begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new turn." Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confreres have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as poets do.