The Ordeal of Mark Twain Part 5

wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a deistical note on G.o.d, who had formed the habit of withholding views which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color--had he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul?

"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any possibility have occurred to him 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 c.u.mbrous 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 consideration for them, refrains from doing.

This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ."

IBSEN: _Letter to Brandes_,1870.

And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and pa.s.sionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his.

Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian interests and affections and appet.i.tes so complete an escape from the labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, from the outset of his life, subjected itself!

Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and a.s.sociations,"

he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood.

We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent.

"To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome--and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had pa.s.sed neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And having accepted the 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 challenge: he was not going to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods,"

"predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied cla.s.s. "A failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things--but then my household expenses are something almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his "disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, "he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. There 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 accommodation of his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"--after a while he virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his mother--"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life--above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy!

To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling pa.s.sion. With the beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of casting bra.s.s 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 Sc.r.a.p-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name.

He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first author in the world to use a type-writer for ma.n.u.script work--his impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"--that he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred million dollars.

Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced in order to give pa.s.sage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"?

Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"--for this he had, in fact, become--he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of authors--he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, "reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, "is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He "liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger to his heart's content and have all the mult.i.tude, 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 G.o.ds 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 Hanc.o.c.k 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 pa.s.sion for getting his name and fame a.s.sociated with those of other men who were secure of the suffrages of the mult.i.tude Mark Twain was almost consciously bidding for approval and corroboration. He had that slavish weakness of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money, power, glory--vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration of our era." Why, pray? Because of her genius for organization, because of her success in "putting over" what he freely calls, in spite of his faith in its methods, the greatest hoax in history. And why did he admire modern Germany and despise modern France? The Frenchman, he said, is "the most ridiculous creature in the world"; his "only race prejudice" was against the French. In this, and in his blind worship of imperial Germany, he reflected the view which the majority of American business men have conveniently forgotten of late years that they ever held. It was not the old Germany that he admired--never that! It was Wilhelm's Germany, Bismarck's Germany. He who, in the "Connecticut Yankee," had set out to make mediaeval England a "going concern" could hardly do other than adore the most splendid example of just that phenomenon in all history.

Mark Twain had, in fact, taken on the whole character and point of view of the American magnate. How enormously preoccupied his later European letters are, for instance, with hotels, cabs, couriers, all the appurtenances of your true Western packing-house prince on tour! We are told that once, by some tragic error, he installed himself and his family in a quarter of Berlin which was "eminently not the place for a distinguished man of letters," and that he hastened to move to one of the best addresses in the city, of which "there was no need to be ashamed." He had become, we see, something of a sn.o.b: a fact ill.u.s.trated by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and circ.u.mstance of his own prestige: so touchy had he become that we find him employing an agent in England to look up the sources of a purely imaginary campaign of abuse he thought a certain New York newspaper was carrying on against him. He wrote, but did not mail, "blasting" letters to his a.s.sailants and those who crossed or criticized him; he indulged in ferocious dreams of libel suits, this man who had staked everything on his reputation! Was it not his glory that he was "beset by all the cranks and beggars in Christendom"? His pride was not in his work, it was in his power and his fame.

Thus it came to pa.s.s, in these middle years of his life, that while in the old world virtually every writer of eminence was inalterably set against the life-destroying tendencies of capitalistic industrialism, Mark Twain found himself the spokesman of the Philistine majority, the headlong enthusiast for what he called "the plainest and st.u.r.diest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen." The second half of "Life on the Mississippi" glows with complacent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept as progress, the purely quant.i.tative progress of an expanding materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In 1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested that "for every fifty thousand 'sacos' a man added to his property he was ent.i.tled to another vote." The fable was published anonymously: the great democratic humorist could hardly father in public the views of the framers of the American Const.i.tution. But we can see from this how far Mark Twain, like the chameleon which he said man was, had taken the colors of the privileged cla.s.s 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 letters and see what he says in the privacy of his correspondence and memoranda. He is strongly against the tariff; he vehemently defends the principle of the strike and woman suffrage; he is consistently for the union of labor as against the union of capital; he bitterly regrets the formation of the Trusts; "a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a presidential succession" is, he says, neither more nor less than monarchism. He deals one blow after another against the tendencies of American imperialism, against the Balance of Power, against the Great Power system. And hear what he writes in 1887: "When I finished Carlyle's 'French Revolution' in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since I have read it differently ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte!--and not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat." All this in the privacy of his correspondence! In public, he could not question, he did not wish to question, the popular drift of his age, the popular cry of his age, "Nothing succeeds like success"! Shall I be told that he created quite a scandal in Hartford by deserting the Republican party and becoming a Mugwump? At least he was in very respectable company. In his impetuous defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one situation after another, defending on the most fact.i.tious grounds, for trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have afforded to take the unpopular view that found expression in his letters. In Berlin our fanatical anti-monarchist compresses his angry views about rebellion against kings into a few secret lines hastily written in his hotel bed-room; then, having been cleverly invited to dine at the Kaiser's right hand, he proceeds to tell the world in a loud voice how incomparable the German Empire is. He was keeping a court of his own, in Berlin, in Vienna, with generals and amba.s.sadors dancing attendance on him!--how could he have spoken out? Yet it was not hypocrisy, this perpetual double-dealing, though we should certainly have thought it so if psychology had not made us familiar with the principle of the "water-tight compartment": Mark Twain was the chronic victim of a mode of life that placed him bodily and morally in one situation after another where, in order to survive, he had to violate the law of his own spirit. To him, in short, all success was a fatality; and just in the degree that his repressed self raged against it, his dominant self became its hierophant, its fugleman. He who wrote an article pa.s.sionately advocating that the salaries of American amba.s.sadors should be quadrupled and that an official costume should be devised for them showed how utterly he failed of any sense of the true function of the man of letters; he had become, quite without realizing it, the mouthpiece of the worldly interests of a primitive commercial society with no ideal save that of material prestige and aggrandizement.

As we have seen, personal and private loyalties had come to take precedence in Mark Twain's mind over all other loyalties; no ideal, with him, no purpose, no belief, was to be weighed for a moment if the pursuit of it, or the promulgation of it, was likely to hurt the feelings of a friend. Quite early in his career he planned a book on England and collected volumes of notes for it only to give over the scheme because he was afraid his criticism or his humor would "offend those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Imagine Emerson having been prevented by any such consideration from writing "English Traits"! I have pointed out how utterly Mark Twain had failed to rise to the conception of literature as a great impersonal social instrument, how immersed he was in the petty, provincial values of a semi-rustic bourgeoisie among whom the slightest expression of individuality was regarded as an attack on somebody's feelings or somebody's pocket-book.

As time had gone on, therefore, and his circle of friends had come to include most of the main pillars of American society, it had become less and less possible for the tongue-tied artist in him to a.s.sert itself against the complacent pioneer. We know what his instinctive religious tendency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his grat.i.tude, was to say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ash.o.r.e when he found me in deep water"--this man had given too many hostages to the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for in the world, the only man I would give a d---- for, the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation is a Standard Oil magnate. If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not." His obligations had gradually come to be innumerable. We find him urging Mr. Rogers to interest the Rockefellers "and the other Standard Oil chiefs" in Helen Keller, trying to inveigle Carnegie into his moribund publishing business as a partner, accepting from "Saint Andrew's" "Triumphant Democracy" the suggestion for his own "Connecticut Yankee" and from Saint Andrew himself a constant supply of Scotch whiskey, begging his "affectionate old friend Uncle Joe" Cannon to accomplish for him a certain piece of copyright legislation. How was Mark Twain to set himself up as a heretic, he who had involved himself over head and ears in the whole complex of popular commercial life, he who was himself one of the big fish in the golden torrent? Only once, in a little book published after his death, "Mark Twain and the Happy Island," does one find his buried self showing its claws. It is there recorded that Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., having asked him to speak before his Sunday School cla.s.s, Mark Twain suggested as his topic an exposition of Joseph's Egyptian policy. The invitation was not repeated.

So we see Mark Twain, this playboy, the pioneer in letters, the strayed reveller, the leader of the herd, giving and taking with a hearty liberality, all inside the folk-feeling of his time, holding the American nation in the hollow of his hand--the nation, or rather the epoch, whose motto he had coined in the phrase, "Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick." Never was a writer more perfectly at home with his public--he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark Twain had set out for the purpose of paying his debts, and no cause would make a deeper appeal to his countrymen than that, or, for that matter, to the world at large." At Hartford, we are told, the whole neighborhood was "like one great family with a community of interests, a unity of ideals," and gradually that circle, "Holy Speculators" and all, had widened until Mark Twain had become everybody's neighbor.

Have I noted enough of his traits to show that in his dominant character he had become the archtypical pioneer? Let me note them once more: an uncritical and uncalculating temper, a large, loose desire for an expansive and expensive all-round life, a habit of accepting from his surroundings "the prevailing ideas and modes of action," a nave worship of success and prestige, an eager and inveterate interest in mechanical inventions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And once, as if to show that he had qualified for the popular 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 publisher; also "an author for twenty years and an a.s.s for fifty-five."

It is only with all this in mind that we can grasp Mark Twain's instinctive conception of the literary career. He never thought of literature as an art, as the study and occupation of a lifetime: it was merely the line of activity which he followed more consistently than any other. Primarily, he was the business man, exploiting his imagination for commercial profit, his objects being precisely those of any other business man--to provide for his family, to gain prestige, to make money because other people made money and to make more money than other people made. We remember how, in 1868, he had written to his brother Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, _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. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away."

Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him was sufficiently awake at the beginning and at the end of his career to realize, in the one case, that he was not living the creative life, and in the other that he had not lived it--for certainly his marriage had not relieved him from the necessity of pleasing the general public!

Between whiles, the creative instinct of the artist had been so supplanted by the acquisitive instinct of the pioneer that he had no conscious sense of control over his life at all: he was not the artist, he was the journalist, the capitalist equally in the fields of business enterprise and of letters.

"If Sam had got that pocket"--we remember the saying of his old California comrade--"he would have remained a pocket-miner to the end of his days." If, indeed, literature had not become for him the equivalent of a gold mine, the only gold mine available on many occasions, would he have continued to write as he did? We know that whenever, as sometimes happened, the repressed spirit of the artist in him raised its head and perceived, if we may say so, the full extent of its _debacle_, Mark Twain was filled with a despondent desire, a momentary purpose even, to stop writing altogether. "Mama and I," wrote his little daughter Susy, "have both been very much troubled of late because papa, since he had been publishing General Grant's books, has seemed to forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it": of the "Connecticut Yankee" he writes elsewhere: "It's my swan-song, my retirement from literature permanently." He always found a certain pleasure in writing even when he was writing at his worst, and yet we can see that the artist in him would gladly have put a stop to this ironical career, if it had not had another aspect, a more practical aspect, that appealed to his dominant self. "From the very beginning Mark Twain's home always meant more to him than his work": which is simply another way of saying that that gregarious pioneer, that comrade and emulator of politicians and magnates who was Mrs. Clemens's husband, found ample reason to continue his literary life for the sake of the material rewards it brought him.

How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr.

Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, and the indignant pa.s.sion of his defense of Harriet Sh.e.l.ley, 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 s.p.a.ced 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 first line of movable types that ever _was_ perfectly s.p.a.ced 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.

n.o.body had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well--dizzy, stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, too far away--as even his financial interest was too shallow, after all--to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age for having produced Walt Whitman.

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 personality which his mother, his wife, all America indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work as a writer.

"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one written by his friend Joseph Twitch.e.l.l in a letter from Switzerland where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitch.e.l.l. "There is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations.

To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I was the kind of person that _does_ things. Does them and reflects afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I still do the thing commanded by Circ.u.mstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition of immaturity.

Then there was his boyish pa.s.sion for make-believe, his inclination for gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at the long corridor known as Peac.o.c.k Alley. When they reached the dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a really royal stair--leading from this entrance down into Peac.o.c.k Alley.

To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the pa.s.sage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appet.i.te for his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one.

When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was "planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or rather still, Tom Sawyer?

Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and economic future seems really bound to pa.s.s. 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated empress's funeral--"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, "will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of it--indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He a.s.sured Mr. Paine that the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-j.a.panese war was "ent.i.tled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history."

And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr.

Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the sort of exploded plat.i.tude one looks for from a famous man of letters?

Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all.

And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped aesthetic sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in heaven":--"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did he like? In painting, Landseer--"and the way he makes animals absolute flesh and blood--insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the beginning--to my mind--their music made all other vocal music cheap; and that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, Kipling--"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong pa.s.sion for Omar Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbo,"

which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was wholly non-aesthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively.

He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's "Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have taken a general pa.s.sive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and Thanatopsianism--in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the most primitive form of 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 correspond with the mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his own juvenility freely registered itself.