The Ordeal of Mark Twain Part 9

Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its inst.i.tutions"--its inst.i.tutions, 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 cla.s.s 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 because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so pa.s.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 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 everything 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 Westerner, 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 Connecticut Yankee, d.a.m.ned 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 ma.s.ses. How happy that publisher must have been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the exuberance 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?-- "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 compet.i.tor." 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 magnificence of his n.o.ble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, less n.o.bly perhaps, but no less patriotically, 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 remarkable 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 Sawyer." "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 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," acc.u.mulated in such a remarkable way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for his own amus.e.m.e.nt 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 understands 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; imagining 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 pa.s.sion, the priceless pa.s.sion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the acc.u.mulated 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 dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905.

To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the premature end of the Russo-j.a.panese War was "ent.i.tled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been arranged by Roosevelt. 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 ill.u.s.trious magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the j.a.panese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome comedy. 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 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 was 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 Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far more genuine pa.s.sion; 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. "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 Russian 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 ent.i.tled 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 bra.s.s, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or Th.o.r.eau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an a.s.sertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of "bra.s.s, 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 "walking with kings," as the advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 ma.s.s of the nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical ma.s.s, 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 strictures 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 disparaging, 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 generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but r.e.t.a.r.ding.

Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's biography. 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 vengeance 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 "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 antiquated 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 G.o.d. Most of the scientists 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, n.o.body 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 preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes about heaven, h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.nation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to curl over infant d.a.m.nation? 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 a.s.signs 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 G.o.d. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 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 hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk.

Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. 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's 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 of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable 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 spectacle 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 English republic: in childhood, and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted n.o.bility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of life and no sense whatever 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 Gulliver 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 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," pa.s.sages of which have been published by Mr.

Paine. Glance at another example. "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, '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 Swiftian, the Rabelaisian 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 precisely, 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 registration 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 pa.s.ses 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 distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his defeat.

"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out."

What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon his life?

"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi,"

"was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and he a.s.sumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic navete of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt contemplation of your n.o.ble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity--to whom old age, far from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out."

His first breathless thought was to "tell the truth" at last. Seventy years, he said again, is "the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach unrebuked." Huck Finn, escaping from an unusually long and disagreeable session with Aunt Polly--that is the posture of Mark Twain, seventy years young, in this moment of release, of relief, of an abandon which, with time, has become filled with sober thoughts. To teach, unrebuked, unabashed, unafraid. Mr. Howells, referring to this period, speaks of "a constant growth in the direction of something like recognized authority in matters of public import": Mark Twain was, indeed, accepted as a sort of national sage. But how is it possible for any one who reads his speeches now, removed from that magnetic presence of his, to feel that he played this role in any distinguished way? Was he really the seer, the clairvoyant public counsellor? He had learned to look with a certain perspective upon what he came to call "this great big ignorant nation": the habitude of such power as he possessed, such experience of the world as he had had--and they were great in their way--showed him how absurd it was to spread the eagle any longer. There is something decidedly fresh and strong about those speeches still. He scouted the fatuous nonsense about "American ideals" that becomes more and more vocal the more closely the one American ideal of "all the people" approaches the vanishing-point. Good, sharp, honest advice he offered in abundance upon the primitive decencies of citizenship in this America, "the refuge of the oppressed from everywhere (who can pay fifty dollars admission)--any one except a Chinaman." Was he not courageous, indeed, this "general spokesman" of the epoch of Bishop Potter and Mrs. Potter Palmer? He who said, "Do right and you will be conspicuous," was the first to realize that his courage was of the sort that costs one little. That pa.s.sion for the limelight, that inordinate desire for approval was a sufficient earnest that he could not, even if he had so desired, do anything essentially unpopular. It was no accident, therefore, that his mind was always drifting back to that famous watermelon story which tens of thousands of living Americans have heard him tell: it appears three times in his published speeches. He told how as a boy he had stolen a watermelon and, having opened it and found it green, returned it to the farmer with a lecture on honesty; whereupon, he was rewarded with the gift of another watermelon that was ripe. It was the symbol of his own career, for his courage, and he frankly admitted it, had always been the sort of courage he described in his story "Luck."

"Tell the truth," in short, he could not; his life had given him so little truth to tell. His seventieth birthday had left him free to speak out; and yet, just as he "played safe" as a public sage, so also he continued to play safe as a writer. "Am I honest?" he wrote in that same seventy-first year to Twitch.e.l.l. "I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it.

There are other difficult duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one." It was his "Bible"--"What Is Man?"--which, as he had said some years before, "Mrs. Clemens loathes, and shudders over, and will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it." Did he publish it at last? Yes, anonymously; and from that final compromise we can see that his "mustering out" had come too late. He could not rouse himself, indeed, from the inertia with which old age and long habits of easy living had fortified the successful half of his double personality. Tolstoy, at eighty, set out on a tragic pilgrimage to redeem in his own eyes a life that had been compromised by wealth and comfort: but the poet in Tolstoy had never slumbered nor slept! It had kept the conflict conscious, it had registered its protest, not sporadically but every day, day in, day out, by act and thought; it had kept its right of way open. Mark Twain had lived too fully the life of the world; the average sensual man had engulfed the poet. Like an old imprisoned revolutionist it faced the gates of a freedom too long deferred. What visions of revolt had thrilled it in earlier years! How it had shaken its bars! But now the sunlight was so sweet, the run of a little sap along those palsied limbs. On his seventieth birthday Mark Twain was dazzled by his liberty. He was going to tell the world the truth, the whole truth, and a little more than the truth! Within a week he found that he no longer had the strength.

Glance at Mr. Paine's record. In 1899, we find him writing as follows to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away. What I have been wanting is a chance to write a book without reserves--a book which should take account of no one's feelings, and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, illusions, delusions: a book which should say my say, right out of my heart, in the plainest language and without a limitation of any sort. I judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth. It is under way, now, and it _is_ a luxury! an intellectual drunk." The book was "The Mysterious Stranger." While he was under the spell of composing it, that sulphurous little fairy tale seemed to him the fruition of his desire. But he was inhibited from publishing it and this only poured oil upon the pa.s.sion that possessed him. At once this craving rea.s.serted itself with tenfold intensity. He tinkered incessantly at "What Is Man?"

He wrote it and rewrote it, he read it to his visitors, he told his friends about it. Eventually he published this, but the fact that he felt he was obliged to do so anonymously fanned his insatiable desire still more. Something more personal he must write now! He fixed his mind on that with a consuming intensity. To express himself was no longer a mere artistic impulse; it had become a categorical imperative, a path out of what was for him a life of sin. "With all my practice," he writes, humorously, in one of his letters, "I realize that in a sudden emergency I am but a poor, clumsy liar." There is nothing humorous, however, in that refusal of his to continue Tom Sawyer's story into later life because he would only "lie like all the other one-horse men in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him": there he expressed all the anguish of his own soul. To tell the truth now! What truth? Any and every kind of truth--anything that it would hurt him to tell and by so doing purge him! We recall how he had adored the frankness of Robert Ingersoll, how he had kept urging his brother Orion to write an autobiography that would spare n.o.body'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 ma.n.u.script, "and I felt haggard after I had finished it. The writer's soul is laid bare; it is shocking." Mark Twain had found a vicarious satisfaction in that, he who at the same moment was himself attempting to write "an absolutely faithful autobiography," as Mr. Paine tells us, "a doc.u.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 pa.s.sion for biography, and especially for autobiography, diaries, letters, and such intimate human history"--for confessions, in a word. He longed now not to reform the world but to redeem himself. "Writing for print!"--he speaks of that as of something unthinkable. A man who writes for print, he seems to say, this man who spoke of free speech as the "Privilege of the Grave," becomes a liar in the mere act. He is afraid of the public, but he is more afraid now of himself, whom he cannot trust. He wishes to write "not to be read," and plans a series of letters to his friends that are not going to be mailed. "You can talk with a quite unallowable frankness and freedom,"

he tells himself, in a little note which Mr. Paine has published, "because you are not going to send the letter. When you are on fire with theology you'll not write it to Rogers, who wouldn't be an inspiration; you'll write it to Twitch.e.l.l, 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 Twitch.e.l.l; 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 pa.s.sage is to be found in the collection of his speeches. "I retired from work on my seventieth birthday. Since then I have been putting in merely twenty-six hours a day dictating my autobiography.... But it is not to be published in full until I am thoroughly dead: I have made it as caustic, fiendish and devilish as possible. It will fill many volumes, and I shall continue writing it until the time comes for me to join the angels. It is going to be a terrible autobiography. It will make the hair of some folks curl. But it cannot be published until I am dead, and the persons mentioned in it and their children and grandchildren are dead. It is something awful."

You see what he has in mind. For twenty years his daily reading has been Pepys and Saint-Simon and Casanova. He is going to have a spree, a debauch of absolutely reckless confession. He is going to tell things about himself, he is going to use all the bold, bad words that used to shock his wife. His wife--perhaps he is even going to be realistic about her. Why not? Has he not already in his letters said two or three "playful" things about her, not incompatible with his affection, but still decidedly wanting in filial respect? Saint Andrew Carnegie and Uncle Joe Cannon, his "affectionate old friend" of the copyright campaign, are fair game anyway, and so are some of those neighbors in Hartford, and so are Howells and Rogers and Twitch.e.l.l. 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 a.s.sume 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 s.p.a.ce, if you can't expand and contract your eye like the ghost you are so soon to be, if you can't bring home for once the harvest of all your pains and all your wisdom? As for that "tearing, booming nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries"--what a humbug it was, so full of cruelties and meannesses and lying hypocrisies!... What fun he is going to have--what magnificently wicked fun!

You see Mark Twain's intention. He is going to write, for his own redemption, the great book that all the world is thirsting for, the book it will gladly, however impatiently, wait a hundred years to read. And what happens? "He found it," says Mr. Paine, "a pleasant, lazy occupation," which prepares us for the kind of throbbing truth we are going to get. Twenty-six instalments of that Autobiography were published before he died in the _North American Review_. They were carefully selected, no doubt, not to offend: the brimstone was held in reserve. But as for the quality of that brimstone, can we not guess it in advance! "He confessed freely," says Mr. Paine, "that he lacked the courage, even the actual ability, to pen the words that would lay his soul bare." One paragraph, in fact, that found its way into print among the diffuse and superficial impressions of the _North American Review_ gives us, we may a.s.sume, the measure of his general candor: "I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book."

Bernard Shaw once described America as a nation of villagers. Well, Mark Twain had become the Village Atheist, the captain of his type, the Judge Driscoll of a whole continent. "Judge Driscoll," we remember, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions." Mark Twain had proved himself superlatively "smart"; he was licensed to say his say what inhibited him now, therefore, even more than his habits of moral slavery, was a sense--how can we doubt it?--a half-unconscious sense that, concerning life itself, he had little of importance to communicate. His struggle of conscience over the publication of "What Is Man?" points, it is true, toward another conclusion. But certainly the writing of his Autobiography must have shown him that with all the will in the world, and with the freedom of absolute privacy, he was incapable of the grand utterance of the prophets and the confessors.

There was nothing to prevent him from publishing "3000 Years Among the Microbes," the design of which was apparently free from personalities, if he had been sufficiently interested to finish it. He thought of founding a School of Philosophy at Redding like that other school at Concord. But none of these impulses lasted. His prodigious "market value" confirmed him at moments, no doubt, in thinking himself a Nestor; but something within this tragic old man must have told him that he was not really the sage, the seer, and that mankind could well exist without the discoveries and the judgments of that gregarious pilgrimage of his.

"It is n.o.ble to be good," he said, during these later years, "but it is n.o.bler 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 p.r.i.c.ked him on to publish more: immature as his judgment was, he had no precise knowledge of the value of his ideas; but at least he knew that great ideas usually shock the public and that if his ideas were great they would probably have that gratifying effect. Fortunately or unfortunately, the book was received, says M. Paine, "as a clever, and even brilliant, _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 pa.s.sion, however, his balked fury, the animus of the repressed satirist in him, turned against the harsher aspects of that civilization which had tied his tongue. Automatically, as we have seen from the incidents of the Gorky dinner and the Portsmouth Conference and the "War Prayer," restraining those impulses that were not supported by the sentiment of a safe majority, he threw himself, with his warm heart and his quick pulse, into the defense of all that are desolate and oppressed. "The human race was behaving very badly," says Mr. Paine, of the hour of his triumphant return to America in 1900: "unspeakable corruption was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa; the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium was ma.s.sacring 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 pa.s.sionate sympathy with suffering and weakness in any form, whether in man or beast. In these later years it was the spectacle of strength triumphing over weakness that alone aroused his pa.s.sion or even, save in his autobiographic and philosophic attempts, induced him to write. One remembers those pages in "Following the Equator" about the exploitation of the Kanakas. Then there was his book about King Leopold and the Congo, and "The Czar's Soliloquy," and "A Horse's Tale," written for Mrs. Fiske's propaganda against bull-fighting in Spain. The Dreyfus case was an obsession with him.

Finally, among many other writings of a similar tendency, there was his "Joan of Arc," in which he had summed up a life-time's rage against the forces in society that array themselves against the aspiring spirit.

Joan of Arc has always been a favorite theme with old men, old men who have dreamed of the heroic life perhaps, without ever attaining it: the sharp realism of Anatole France's biography, which so infuriated Mark Twain, was, if he had known it, the prerogative of a veteran who, equally as the defender of Dreyfus, the comrade of 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 exclusively in attacks of one kind or another. His mind, whether for good or ill, has become thoroughly destructive. He is consumed by a will to attack, a will to abolish, a will to destroy: "sometimes," he had written, a few years earlier, "my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside." He who had become definitely a pessimist, we are told, at forty-eight, in the hour of his great prosperity, was possessed now with a rage for destruction. Who can doubt that this was pathological? He was so promiscuous in his attacks!

Had he not, as early as 1881, a.s.sailed even the postage rates; had he not been thrown into a fury by an order from the Post Office Department on the superscription of envelopes? There were whole days, one is told, when he locked himself up in his rooms and refused to see his secretary, when he was like a raging animal consumed with a blind and terrible pa.s.sion of despair: we can hear his leonine roars even in the gentle pages of his biographer. Mr. Paine tells how he turned upon him one day and said fiercely: "Anybody that knows anything knows that there was not a single life that was ever lived that was worth living"; and again: "I have been thinking it out--if I live two years more I will put an end to it all. I will kill myself." Was that a pose, as Mr. Howells says?

Was it a mere humorous fancy, that "plan" for exterminating the human race by withdrawing all the oxygen from the earth for two minutes? Was it a mere impersonal sympathy for mankind, that perpetual search for means of eas.e.m.e.nt and alleviation, that obsessed interest in Christian Science, in therapeutics? Was it not all, in that sound and healthy frame, the index of a soul that was mortally sick? Mark Twain's attack upon the failure of human life was merely a rationalization of the failure in himself.

And this failure was the failure of the artist in him.

Glance back thirty years; hear what he writes to Mr. Howells from Italy in 1878: "I wish I _could_ give those sharp satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor; whereas I _hate_ travel, and I _hate_ hotels, and I _hate_ the opera, and I _hate_ the old masters. In truth, I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to satirize it. No, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth, or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp. I have got in two or three chapters about Wagner's operas, and managed to do it without showing temper, but the strain of another such effort would burst me." That is what had become of the satirist, that is what had become of the artist, thirty years before He, the unconscious sycophant of the cra.s.s materialism of the Gilded Age, who had, in "The Innocents Abroad," poured ignorant scorn upon so many of the sublime creations of the human spirit, he, the playboy, the comrade and emulator of magnates and wire-pullers, had begun even then to pay with an impotent fury for having transgressed his own instincts unawares. A born artist ridiculing art, a born artist hating art, a born artist destroying art--there we have the natural evolution of a man who, in the end, wishes to destroy himself and the world. How angrily suspicious he is, even this early, of all 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 prost.i.tute because she wears a low-cut dress. But the peasant spits on the ground and walks on. Mark Twain cannot take it so lightly: that low-cut dress is a red rag to him; he foams and stamps wherever he sees it. Is it not evident that he is the prey of some appalling repression? It is not in the nature of man to desire a club so that he can pound works of art into rags and pulp unless they are the symbols of something his whole soul unconsciously desires to create and has been prevented from creating. Do we ask, then, why Mark Twain "detested" novels? It was because he had been able to produce only one himself, and that a failure.

We can understand now that intense will-of-to-believe in the creative life which Mark Twain revealed in his later writings. "Man originates nothing, not even a thought.... Shakespeare could not create. He was a machine, and machines do not create." Is it possible to mistake the animus in that? Mark Twain was an ardent Baconian: in that faith, he said, "I find comfort, solace, peace and never-failing joy." I will say nothing of the complete lack of intuition concerning the psychology of the artist revealed in his pamphlet, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" It is astonishing that any writer could have composed this, that any one but a retired business man or a lawyer infatuated with ratiocination could have so misapprehended the nature and the processes of the poetic mind.