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THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN

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THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN

BY

VAN WYCK BROOKS

.• i

AUTHOR OF “LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP,” ETC.

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“Think it over, dear B-- ! A man’s gifts are not a property: they are a duty**

— Ibsen’s Letters

N

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1920,

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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TO

E. S. B.

i

CONTENTS

CH A' •-JSB PAGE

I. Introductory: Mark Twain’s Despair . . 1

II. The Candidate for Life . 26

III. The Gilded Age . 51

TV. In the Crucible . 73

V. The Candidate for Gentility . 100

i

•“VI. Everybody’s Neighbor . 128

VII. The Playboy in Letters . 148

VIII. Those Extraordinary Twins . 178

*

IX. Mark Twain’s Humor ........ 198

X. Let Somebody Else Begin . 221

XI. Mustered Out . 246

THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN

THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN

CHAPTER I

\

INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN’S DESPAIR

* 4 What a man sees iD the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason.’ ’ — Marginal note in one of Marie T wain’s books.

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

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

i

2 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

mately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of his “pose” regarding “the damned human race,” and we know the opinion of his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was “not a pessimist in his heart, but only by premeditation.” These views were apparently borne out by his own testimony. “My temperament,” he wrote, shortly after the death of his daughter Jean, “has never allowed my spirits to remain depressed long at a time.” That he remained active and buoyant to the end was, in fact, for his associates, sufficient evidence that his philosophical despair was only an anomaly, which had no organic part in the structure of his life.

Was it not natural that they should feel thus about him, those contemporaries of his, so few of whom had seen his later writings and all the tell-tale private mem¬ oranda which Mr. Paine has lately given to the world? What a charmed life was Mark Twain’s, after all! To be able to hold an immense nation in the hollow of one’s hand, to be able to pour out into millions of sympathetic ears, with calm confidence, as into the ears of a faithful friend, all the private griefs and intimate humors of a lifetime, to be called “the King” by those one loves, to be so much more than a king in reality that every attack of gout one has is “good for a column” in the newspapers and every phrase one utters girdles the world in twenty minutes, to be addressed as “the Mes¬ siah of a genuine gladness and joy to the millions of three continents” — what more could Tom Sawyer, at least, have wished than that? And Mark Twain’s fame was not merely one of sentiment. If the public heart was moved by everything that concerned him, — an ill¬ ness in his household, a new campaign against political corruption, a change of residence, and he was deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won the world’s pity when he got into debt and the world’s praise when he got out of it, he was no sort of nine days’ wonder; his country had made him its “gen-

3

Mark Twain’s Despair

eral spokesman,” he was quite within his rights in appointing himself, as he said, “ambassador-at-large of the United States of America.” Since the day, half a century back, when all official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over “The Innocents Abroad” and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices to the day when the newspapers were freely pro¬ posing that he ought to have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a sort of incarnation of the character and qual¬ ity of modern America. “Everywhere he moved,” says Mr. Paine, “a world revolved about him.” In London, in Vienna, his apartments were a court, and traffic rules were modified to let him pass in the street. A charmed life, surely, when we consider, in addition to this public acclaim, the tidal waves of wealth that flowed in upon him again and again, the intense happiness of his family relations, and the splendid recognition of those fellow- members of his craft whose word to him was final — Kipling, who “loved to think of the great and godlike Clemens, ’ ’ and Brander Matthews, who freely compared him with the greatest writers of history, and Bernard Shaw, who announced that America had produced just two geniuses, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Finally, there was Mr. Howells, “the recognized critical Court of Last Resort in this country,” as he called him. Did not Mr. Howells, like posterity itself, whisper in his ear: “Your foundations are struck so deep that you will catch the sunshine of immortal years, and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare”?

The spectators of this drama could hardly have been

4 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

And his physical health was just what one might

Mark Twain’s Despair 5

expect from this, from his immense vitality. He was subject to bronchial colds and he had intermittent attacks of rheumatism in later years: otherwise, his health appears to have been as perfect as his energy was inexhaustible. “I have been sick a-bed several days, for the first time in 21 years, ’ ’ he writes in 187 5 ; from all one gathers he might have made the same statement twenty-one, thirty-one years later. Read his letters, at fifty, at sixty, at seventy — during that extraordinary period, well within the memory of people who are still young, when he had solved his financial difficulties by going into bankruptcy and went about, as Mr. Paine - says, “like a debutante in her first season/’ — the days when people called him “the Belle of New York”: “By half past 4,” he writes to his wife, “I had danced all those people down — and yet was not tired, merely breathless. I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at work on this letter to you.” And again, the next year, his sixtieth year, when he had been playing billiards with H. H. Rogers, until Rogers looked at him helplessly and asked, “Don’t you ever get tired?”: “I was able to say that I had for¬ gotten what that feeling was like. Don’t you remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one daylight nap since I have been here.” Finally, let us take the testi¬ mony of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, during the last five years of his life when, even at seventy-four, he was still playing billiards “9 hours a day and 10 or 12 on Sunday”: “In no other human being have I ever seen such physical endurance. I was comparatively a young man, and by no means an invalid ; but many a time, far in the night, when I was ready to drop with exhaustion, he was still as fresh and buoyant and eager for the game as at the moment

6 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

7

Mark Twain’s Despair

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

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

a man.

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

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

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

8 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

9

Mark Twain’s Despair

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

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

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

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

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

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

io The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

I

Mark Twain’s Despair n

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

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

12 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

13

Mark Twain’s Despair

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

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

14 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

i

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

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

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

Mark Twain’s Despair 15

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

16 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

So much for what Mark Twain actually accomplished. But if he had not been potentially a great man could he have so impressed, so dazzled almost every one who came into direct, personal contact with him ? When his contemporaries compared him with Swift, Voltaire, Cer¬ vantes, they were certainly mistaken; but would they have made that mistake if they had not recognized in him, if not a creative capacity, at least a creative force, of the highest rank? Mark Twain’s unbounded energy, his prodigal fertility, his large utterance, that 44 great, burly fancy” of his, as Mr. Howells calls it, his powers of feeling, the unique magnetism of his personality were the signs of an endowment, one cannot help think¬ ing, more extraordinary than that of any other Ameri¬ can writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or per¬ haps like Pushkin, who are as if intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth to the leading impulses of entire epochs. ‘ 4 1 thought, ’ ’ said one of his associates in earlier years, 4 4 that the noble costume of the Albanian would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric’s warriors, or stood at the prow of one of the swift craft of the vikings. ’ ’ And on the other hand, hear what Mr. Plowells says: 4 4 Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens’s central and final personality was something exquisite.” That com¬ bination of barbaric force and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him — is there not about it some¬ thing portentous, something that suggests the true lord of life ? Wherever he walked among men he trailed with him the psychic atmosphere of a planet as it were all his own. Gigantic, titanic were the words that came to people’s lips when they tried to convey their impres-

Mark Twain’s Despair 17

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

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

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

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

18 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

Mark Twain’s Despair 19

Plaza Hotel until the appointed hour. ... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation.’7 And must not the desire for approval and corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, “the King”? Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obses¬ sion: kings, empresses, princes, archduchesses — what a part they play in his biography! He is always drag¬ ging them in, into his stories, into his letters, writing about his dinners with them, and his calls upon them, and how friendly they are, and what gorgeous funerals they have. And as with kings, so also with great men, or men who were considered great, or men who were merely notorious. Pie makes lists of those he has known, those he has spent evenings with — Mark Twain, to whom celebrity was the cheapest thing going ! Is there not in all this the suggestion of an almost conscious weakness clutching at strength, the suggestion of some kind of failure that sets a premium upon almost any kind of success ?

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

20 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

i

he thought. “I haven’t as good an opinion of my work as yon hold of it,” he writes to Mr. Howells in 1887, 4 ‘but I’ve always done what I could to secure and enlarge my good opinion of it. I’ve always said to myself, ‘Everybody reads it and that’s something — it surely isn’t pernicious, or the most acceptable people would get pretty tired of it.’ And when a critic said by implication that it wasn’t high and fine, through the remark, ‘High and fine literature is wine,’ I retorted (confidentially to myself), ‘Yes, high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.’ ” That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, beseeching a fair hearing in England for the “Connecticut Yankee.” He rails against “the cultivated-class standard”; he half poses as an uplifter of the masses ; then, with a touch of mock- noble indignation, he confesses to being a popular enter¬ tainer, fully convinced at least that there are two kinds of literature and that an author ought to be allowed to put upon his book an explanatory line : ‘ ‘ This is written for the Head, ” or “ This is written for the Belly or the Members.” No plea more grotesque or more pathetic was ever written by a man with a great reputation to support. It shows that Mark Twain was completely ignorant of literary values: had he not wished upon literature, as it were, a separation between the “Head” and the “Belly” which, as we shall see, had simply taken place in himself? Out of his own darkness he begs for the word of salvation from one who he thinks can bestow it.

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

Mark Twain’s Despair 21

a generation, he was a favored equal. But in the inti¬ mate presence of some isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the candidate for the mysta- gogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow writer, he became one of the devout Yankee multitude. Was it Browning? He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied for a time with the naive self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen ? Read this humorous entry in one of his Ber¬ lin note-books: “Been taken for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was found the brains were different.” In fact, whenever he uses the word “literature” in connection with his own work it is with a sudden self-consciousness that lets one into fhe secret of his inner humility. ‘ ‘ I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the world, so far as I know,” he writes to the authorities of Yale in 1888. A man who freely compared himself with the melodeon, as distinguished from the opera, who, in the preface to “Those Extraordinary Twins,” invited his readers, who already knew how “the born and trained novelist works,” to see how the “jack-leg” does it, could never have been accused of not knowing his true rank. “You and I are but sewing-machines,” he says in “What Is Man?” “We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobe¬ lins. ’ 9

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

22 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain’s Despair 23

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

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

24 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

We are in possession now, it seems to me, of the secret of Mark Twain ’s mechanistic philosophy, the philosophy of that little book which he called his “Bible/’ “What Is Man?’’ He was extremely proud of the structure of logic he had built up on the thesis that man is a machine, “moved, directed, commanded by exterior in¬ fluences, solely,” that he is “a chameleon, who takes the color of his place of resort,” that he is “a mere coffee- mill,” which is permitted neither “to supply the coffee nor turn the crank.” He confesses to a sort of pro¬ prietary interest and pleasure in the validity of that notion. 1 ‘ Having found the Truth, ’ ’ he says, 4 ‘ preced¬ ing that beyond question man has but one moving im¬ pulse — the contenting of his own spirit — and is merely a machine and entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in patching and paint¬ ing and puttying and calking my priceless possession and in looking the other way when an imploring argu¬ ment or a damaging fact approaches.” You see how it pleases him, how much it means to him, that final “Truth,” how he clings to it with a sort of defiant insolence against the “imploring argument,” the “dam¬ aging fact”? “Man originates nothing,” he says, “not even a thought. . . . Shakespeare could not create. He was a machine, and machines do not create.” Faith never gave the believer more comfort than this phil¬ osophy gave Mark Twain.

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

Mark Twain’s Despair 25

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE

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

Stendhal: On Love in the United States.

IN 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many 3^ears in the East, revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather material for his book, “Life on the Mississippi.’ * It was, naturally, a profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot of the steamer Gold Dust recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. “We got to be good friends, of course,” he said, “and I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down be¬ low Cairo, and there was a big, full river — for it was high-water season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river — I had her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twTenty years before.”

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

26

The Candidate for Life

27

the passing of time and the charm and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his 4 ‘ literary adventures ’ ’ sets one thinking. It is not alto¬ gether flattering to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely “ happy and care-free” a man of Mark Twain’s energy and power could hardly, in later life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he cer¬ tainly did : all his days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a lost paradise. “I’d rather be a pilot than anything else I’ve ever done in my life,” he told his old master, Horace Bixby. “I am a person,” he wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, “who would quit authorizing in a minute to go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it. ’ ’ Quite an obsession, we see ; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact that the earlier pages of “Life on the Mississippi,” in which he pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and expressive that he ever wrote.

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

28 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

i

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

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

The Candidate for Life

29

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

30 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

The Candidate for Life

3i

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

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

32 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

The Candidate for Life 33

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

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

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

34 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

The Candidate for Life 35

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

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

36 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

The Candidate for Life

37

him of that.” And his mother was so strong, so cour¬ ageous, the only strong and courageous influence he knew. “In some vague way,” says Mr. Paine, “he set them down” — the fearful spectacles of escaping slaves, caught and beaten and sold — “as warnings, or punish¬ ments, designed to give him a taste for a better life.” Warnings, in short, not to tempt Providence himself, not to play with freedom ! 4 4 He felt that it was his own conscience that made these things torture him. That was his mother ’s idea, and he had a high respect for her moral opinions.” Naturally! And she 4 4 punished him and pleaded with him, alternately” — with one inevitable result. 4 4 4 To fear God and dread the Sunday School, ’ 1 ’ he wrote to Mr. Howells in later years, 4 4 exactly de¬ scribed that old feeling which I used to have”; and he tells us also that as a boy he wanted to be a preacher, 4 ‘because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. ’ ’ Can we not see that already the boy whose interests and preferences and activities diverge from those of the accepted type had become in his eyes the 4 4 bad” boy, that individuality itself, not to mention the creative life, had become for him identical with “sin”?

Many a great writer, many a great artist, no doubt, has grown up and flourished like a blade of grass be¬ tween the cobblestones of Calvinism. Scotland has a tale to tell. But Scotland has other strains, other tradi¬ tions, books and scholars, gaieties, nobilities — how can we compare the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe with that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle West of ours? How was Mark Twain to break the spell of his infancy and find a vocation there ? Calvinism itself had gone to seed : it was nothing but the dead hand of cus¬ tom; the flaming priest had long since given way to the hysterical evangelist. Grope as he might, he could find nowhere, either in men or in hooks, the bread and wine of the spirit. In all his youth, unless we except that journeyman chair-maker, Frank Burrough, who

38 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

had a taste for Dickens and Thackeray, there is record of only one thinking soul whom he encountered, a Scotchman named Macfarlane, whom he met in Cincin¬ nati. “They were long fermenting discourses, ’ ’ Mr. Paine tells us, “that young Samuel Clemens listened to that winter in Macfarlane ’s room. ’ ’ And what was the counsel which, from that sole source, his blind and wavering aptitude received ? — that ‘ ‘ man ’s heart was the only bad one in the animal kingdom, that man was the only animal capable of malice, vindictiveness, drunken¬ ness’ * and that his intellect was only a “depraving addition to him which, in the end, placed him in a rank far below the other beasts.” Propitious words for this candidate for the art of living! And as with men, so it was with books. In “Life on the Mississippi” there is a memorable picture of the library in the typical gentleman’s house all the way from St. Louis to New Orleans: Martin Tupper, “Friendship’s Offering,” “Affection’s Wreath,” Ossian, “Alonzo and Melissa,” “Ivanhoe,” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” “piled and disposed with cast-iron exactness, according to an inher¬ ited and unchangeable plan.” How, indeed, could the cultural background of that society have been anything but stagnant when no fresh stream of cultural interest could possibly penetrate through the foreground? One day, in the dusty, littered streets of Hannibal, Mark Twain picked up a loose page, the page of some life of Joan of Arc, which was flying in the wind. That seed, so planted, was to blossom half a century later: even now it began to put forth little tentative shoots. “It gave him his cue, ’ ’ says Mr. Paine, 1 ‘ the first word of a part in the human drama,” and he conceived a sudden interest in history and languages. Anything might have come of that impulse if it had had the least pro¬ tection, if it had been able to find a guideway. As a matter of fact, as a matter of course, it perished in a joke.

The Candidate for Life

39

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

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

“The boy Sam was fairly broken down. Remorse, which always dealt with him unsparingly, laid a heavy hand on him now. Wildness, disobedience, indifference to his father’s wishes, all were remembered; a hundred things, in themselves trifling, became ghastly and heart¬ wringing in the knowledge that they could never be undone. Seeing his grief, his mother took him by the hand and led him into the room where his father lay. 4 It is all right, Sammy,’ she said. ‘What’s done is done, and it does not matter to him any more; but here by

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

He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung him¬ self into her arms. ‘ I will promise anything, ’ he sobbed,

40 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

The Candidate for Life

4i

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

42 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

The Candidate for Life

43

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

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

Mr. Paine expresses surprise that Mark Twain should have embarked upon this career with such passionate earnestness, that the man whom the world was to know later — 1 1 dreamy, unpractical, and indifferent to details ’ ’ — should ever have persisted in acquiring the “abso¬ lutely limitless” knowledge it necessitated. He explains it by the fact that Mark Twain “loved the river in its every mood and aspect and detail, and not only the river, but a steamboat ; and still more, perhaps, the free¬ dom of the pilot’s life and its prestige.” Mr. Paine

44 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

The Candidate for Life 45

unconsciously sought to suppress men with special voca¬ tions. ’ ’

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

46 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

“ taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain stand¬ ing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. ” Pilots were, he says, 4 ‘treated with marked deference by all, officers and servants and pas¬ sengers, ” and he adds naively: “I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew wTho failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of travel¬ ing foreign princes.” Above all, and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of experience in American society, recurs with most sig¬ nificant emphasis, the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole condition with¬ out which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. “A pilot in those days,” he says, with tragic exaggera¬ tion, ‘ ‘ was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people . . . the editor of a newspaper . . . clergymen . . . writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we ‘modify* before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none.”

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

The Candidate for Life 47

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

48 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

The Candidate for Life 49

ship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, how tremendous every one knows who has read “Life on the Mississippi”: “even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot’s trade,” says Mr. Paine, “it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles.” The answer is to be found only in the fact that, em¬ barked as he was at last on a career that called su¬ premely for self-reliance, independence, initiative, judg¬ ment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. ‘ ‘ Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, ’ ’ he writes to his brother Orion, “and we give our greatest share of ad¬ miration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it ! I want a man to — I want you to — take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil. ’ 9 Is this the Mark Twain who, in later life, read¬ ing in Seutonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man in wide repute “for his want of energy,” wrote on the margin of the book, “I guess this is where our line starts”?

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

50 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another.” He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment’s inspiration to study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. “The pilots, 9 9 says Mr. Paine, ‘ ‘ regarded him as a great reader — a student of history, travels, literature, and the sci¬ ences — a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. ’ ’

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

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

CHAPTER III

THE GILDED AGE

“The American democracy follows its ascending march, uni¬ form, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as the decrees of eternity. ,}

George Bancroft

OU conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread

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

river

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

52 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

53

The Gilded Age

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

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

54 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

55

The Gilded Age

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

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

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

56 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

well be called the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and again. “He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had made a pic¬ ture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the tunnel. . . . Perhaps some day — he felt it must be so some day — he would strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it then? . . . No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to him. . . . Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was all before him where to choose. ” Routed by the stubborn mountain, he persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. “Three or four times in as many weeks he said to himself: ‘Am I a visionary? I must be a visionary P ” His workers desert him: “after that, Philip fought his bat¬ tle alone/ ’ Once more he begins to have doubts: “I am conquered. ... I have got to give it up. . . . But I am not conquered. I will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with fate. Ah, me, it may1 be years, it may be years!” And then, at last, when the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it! “Philip in luck,” we are told, “had become suddenly a person of consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom.” Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and the Gilded Age is justified in its children.

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

57

The Gilded Age

the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious character of American business. ‘ ‘ The Gilded Age ’ ’ enables us to verify that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure in Philip’s search for the coal-mine. He lives in the “ faith” of discovering it; he sees himself as another “Adam,” as a “hermit” consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long for in your youth when the world is fresh to you ; he invokes Provi¬ dence to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for it, as a “visionary”; he speaks of “fighting his battle alone,” of “another fight with fate.” This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the mere zeal of the mere votary ; it is, quite specifically, the religious zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in the process, so he is to others in the event : 1 1 The words of a proprietor of a rich coal¬ mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom.” The hero, in other words, has become the prophet.

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

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

58 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

59

The Gilded Age

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

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

6o The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

6i

The Gilded Age

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

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

62 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

The Gilded Age 63

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

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

64 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

The Gilded Age 65

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

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

66 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

In “Koughing It,” Mark Twain has pictured the population of the gold-fields. “It was a driving, vigor¬ ous, restless population in those days,” he says. “It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men — not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stal¬ wart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent man¬ hood — the very pick and choice of the world’s glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans — none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants. ... It was a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home — you never find that sort of people among pioneers.” Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and calcu¬ lating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farth¬ est edge of the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the future. + But what was the result 1 One is often told by New Englanders who were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of story-writers and, more recently, of poets, familiarized us with the life of this New England countryside during the generation that followed — those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a

The Gilded Age 67

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

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

68 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new regime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien editor of The Atlantic Monthly , was consecrated to the high priesthood by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life — an inci¬ dent that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his prime dogma, that 4 ‘the more smiling aspects of life are the more American ,r: the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about Amer¬ ica anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an essentially passive and feminine conception of his art ; and while his super¬ ficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dis-

The Gilded Age 69

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

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

70 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

mously, and Henry Adams his novel, ‘ ‘ Democracy. ’ 9 With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding type before the Civil War, restrained them from impair¬ ing, by strong assertions of individual judgment, “the consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value.,’ The tradition of literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who are under a categorical impera¬ tive to pursue their vocation frankly and disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American minds; our authors generally had accepted the com¬ placent dictum of William Cullen Bryant that literature is “a good staff but a bad crutch,” not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate minds justi¬ fied themselves by representing the artist as a sort of glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction : we can see from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by theory. In general, however, the new dis¬ pensation bred a race of writers who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form.

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

7i

The Gilded Age

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

72 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

CHAPTER IV

IN THE CRUCIBLE

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

Gustave Rodrigues : The People of Action.

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

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

73

74 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

In the Crucible

75

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

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

76 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

What chance was there now for the artist in Mark

In the Crucible

77

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

78 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

In the Crucible

79

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

It is a significant fact, under these circumstances, that Mark Twain failed as a miner. He had good luck, now and then, enough to make wealth a tantalizing possi¬ bility. He describes, though we are told with exaggera¬ tion, how he was once ‘ 1 a millionaire for ten days. ’ ’ But he failed as a miner precisely because he was unable to bring to his new work any of those qualities that had made him so successful as a pilot. Concentration, perse¬ verance, above all, judgment — these were the qualities that former career had given birth to. The craftsman’s life had instantly matured him; the life of sheer ex¬ ploitation, in spite of his sense of duty, in spite of the incentives of his environment, in spite of the prospects of wealth and prestige it offered him, could not fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He went off prospecting, and with what result? “One week of this satisfied me, ’ ’ he said. ‘ ‘ I resigned. ’ ’ Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. ‘ ‘ The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion,” we are told, “are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excite¬ ment; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often pro¬ fane; they are likely to be violent. Even the handwrit¬ ing has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania.” Then the pendulum swings to the other extreme: he is utterly disgusted and has but one wish, to give up everything and go away. “If Sam had got that pocket,” said one of his comrades, of his last exploit, * ‘ he would have remained a pocket-miner to the

8o The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

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

In the Crucible

81

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

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

Assuming, as we are obliged to assume, that Mark Twain was a born writer, it is natural to suppose that he would have welcomed any opportunity to exchange his uncongenial and futile life as a miner for a life of lit¬ erary activities and associations. He would naturally have gravitated toward such people as the Enterprise group : that he did so is proved by his constantly court¬ ing them as a contributor. But committing himself by accepting their offer of a position was quite a different matter, in spite of the fact that they, as happy-go-lucky journalists, were in perfectly good standing with the rest of the pioneers. 4 ‘ Everybody had money ; everybody wanted to laugh and have a good time, ’ ’ says Mr. Paine.

82 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

1 1 The Enterprise, ‘ Comstock to the backbone, ’ did what it could to help things along.’’ Certainly Mark Twain could not have thought he would be losing caste by con¬ necting himself with an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? “In ‘Roughing It,’ ” says Mr. Paine, “we are led to believe that the author re¬ garded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the ‘ call, ’ ’ ’ and it was only when ‘ ‘ the money situation” had become truly “desperate” and he had lost all hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding himself he set off at mid¬ night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile walk through uninhabited country: “He had gone into the wilder¬ ness,” says Mr. Paine, “to fight his battle alone”; and we are told that he came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his piloting career! There had been no hesitation then! He had walked forward with clear eye and sure foot like a man registering an inevitable choice of his whole soul. Now he has to battle with himself and the step he finally takes has, to my sense, the strangest air of a capitulation. He walked all the way from Aurora to Virginia City, a hundred and thirty miles, drifting into the Enterprise office worn and travel-stained, we are told, on a hot, dusty August day. “My starboard leg seems to be unshipped, ’ ’ he announced at the door. “I’d like about one hundred yards of line; I think I am falling to pieces.” Then he added: “My name is Clemens, and I’ve come to write for the paper.” It was, says Mr. Paine, “the master of the world’s widest estate come to claim his kingdom.” Am I mistaken, however, i- feel¬ ing that there is something painful in that scene, ome- thing shamefaced, something that suggests not an acclamation but a surrender?

In the Crucible

83

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

84 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

In the Crucible

85

But there is plenty of other evidence to corroborate these intuitions. Mr. Paine tells us that henceforth, in his letters home, “the writer rarely speaks of his work at all, and is more inclined to tell of the mining shares he has accumulated, ’ ’ that there is “no mention of his new title ” — the pen-name he had adopted — “and its success.” He knew that his severe Calvinistic mother could hardly sympathize with his scribblings, worthy or unworthy, that she was much more concerned about the money he was making ; he who had sworn never to come home again until he was a rich man was ashamed in his mother’s eyes to have adopted a career that promised him success indeed, but a success incomparable with that of the mining magnate he had set out to be. Still, that success immediately proved to be considerable, and if he had felt any essential pride in his new work he would certainly have said something about it. What we actually find him writing is this: “I cannot overcome my repugnance to telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do.” That he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name : ‘ 1 His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned,” says Mr. Paine. “They were easily identified with one another, but not with a personality. He realized that to build a reputa¬ tion it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the nom de plume was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unforget¬ table. He tried over a good many combinations in his mind, but none seemed convincing,” etc., etc. In short, he wanted a trade mark in order to sell what he instinctively regarded as his merchandise; and the fact that the pen-name was the fashion of the time — in

86 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

pioneer circles, especially, observe — simply argues that all the other writers in the West were in a similar case. The pen-name was a form of 4 4 protective coloration ’ ’ for men who could not risk, in their own persons, the odium of the literary life, and it is an interesting coincidence that 4 4 Mark Twain,” in the pilot’s vocabulary, implied “safe water.” We shall see later how very significant this coincidence was in Mark Twain’s life: what we observe now is that he instinctively thought of his writing as something external to himself, as something of which he was proud only because it paid.

It is quite plain, then, that far from having found himself again, as he had once found himself on the Mississippi, Mark Twain had now gone astray. He had his ups and downs, his success, however prodigious, was intermittent ; but whether he was up or whether he was down he was desperately ill-at-ease within: his letters and memoranda show all the evidence of a 4 4 bad con¬ science.” Hear him in San Francisco: 4 4 We have been here only four months, yet we have changed our lodgings five times. We are very comfortably fixed where we are now and have no fault to find with the rooms or the people. . . . But I need change and must move again.” Whatever else that incessant, senseless movement may mean, it is certainly not the sign of a man whose work absorbs him, whose nature is crystallizing along its proper lines. 4 4 Home again,” he notes in his journal, after those weeks of respite in the Sandwich Islands. 4 4 No — not home again — in prison again, and all the wild sense of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!” Work, writing, had become in his eyes identical with toil: “Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period,” says Mr. Paine, 4 4 that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the trig¬ ger.” And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother

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87

from New York as he is about to start on the Quaker City excursion which is to result in “The Innocents Abroad’ ’ and his great fame. There are two letters, written within the same week of June, 1867 ; the eager¬ ness of his youth does not suffice to explain their agita¬ tion. In the first he says : “ I am wild with impatience to move — move — move! . . . Curse the endless delays! They always kill me — they make me neglect every duty and then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month.” The second is even more specific: “I am so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory. My mind is stored full of unworthy conduct toward Orion and toward you all, and an accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless moving from place to place. ... You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt. ’ ’ The reason he assigns for this frame of mind is wholly unacceptable: far from being guilty of “unworthy conduct” toward his family, there is every evidence that he had been, as he remained, the most loyal and bountiful of sons and guardians. “Under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt.” Could he say more plainly that he has com¬ mitted himself to a course of action which has, in some quite definite way, transgressed his principle of growth ?

One further, final proof. In 1865 “The Jumping Frog” was published in New York, where, according to one of the California correspondents, it was “voted the best thing of the day.” How did Clemens, who was still in the West, receive the news of his success? “The tele¬ graph,” says Mr. Paine, “did not carry such news in those days, and it took a good while for the echo of his victory to travel to the Coast. When at last a lagging word of it did arrive, it would seem to have brought

88 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

In the Crucible

89

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

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

90 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

ready to laugh,” says Mr. Paine, “found delight in his expression and discovered a vast humor in his most earnest statements”; the opera-houses of the mining- towns wherever he went were packed at two dollars a seat; “his improved dress and increased prosperity commanded additional respect.” He had “acquired,” in short, “a new and lucrative profession at a bound”; and before he went East, and owing to the success of “The Jumping Frog,” “those about him were inclined to regard him, in some degree at least, as a national literary figure, and to pay tribute accordingly.” When he set out on the voyage of the Quaker City he found himself “billed as an attraction” with General Sher¬ man and Henry Ward Beecher. But this was only a faint promise of the glory that was to follow the pub¬ lication of 4 ‘ The Innocents Abroad. ’ ’ It was his second book : his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides this, it brought him the recognition of The Atlantic Monthly. It brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be disposed to accept — “they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a Min¬ ister,” he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President’s appointment, senators guarantee the con¬ firmation of the Senate. It brought him presently a tremendous reception from “the brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London — mine being (between you and me),” he writes to his publisher, “a name which was received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause whe n the long list of guests was called.” It brought him an offer from at least one magazine of ‘ ‘ $6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on any subject.” It brought him lecture '^gagements that paid him $1,600 in gold for a single

In the Crucible

9i

evening; and so popular were these lectures that when one night in Pittsburgh he “played” against Fanny Kemble, the favorite actress of the period, ‘ ‘ Miss Kemble had an audience of two hundred against nearly ten times the number who gathered to hear Mark Twain.” Could this divided soul, who had rebelled against the career into which he was drifting, question a verdict like that? Almost from the outset his filial conscience had been appeased: of his first lecture tour in Nevada and Cali¬ fornia we are told that “it paid him well; he could go home now, without shame.” But even the promptings of his artistic conscience were now parried and laid at rest: “he had grown more lenient in his opinion of the merits of the 1 Frog’ story itself since it had made friends in high places, especially since James Russell Lowell had pronounced it ‘the finest piece of humorous writing yet produced in America.’ ” Thus whatever doubts Mark Twain might still have harbored regarding the vital propriety of his new career were opportunely overlaid by the very persons he could not fail to respect the most.

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

92 -The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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

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

In the Crucible

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

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

94 The Ordeal of Mark Twain

late, there were probably not ten souls in all America capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said to him: “You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend — into life and into yourself.” Mark Twain had followed Ward’s injunction and “extended his audience east¬ ward” by going East himself. He “never forgot,” we are told, “that advice” of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the “choice and refined party” of the Quaker City excursion which led him to the feet of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? “Now here,” said he — Mark Twain re¬ ports the interview in one of his letters, 4 4 now here, you are one of the talented men of the age — nobody is going to deny that — but in matters of business I don ’t suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains. I’ll tell you what to do and how to do it.” And there¬ upon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him how to make a contract for 4 4 The Innocents Abroad” in which his percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in the