Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of _The Galaxy,_ to which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad"
his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a humorous work--that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West.
The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for ice water: Mark Twain"s humor fulfilled during its generation a national demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by d.i.c.kens. We have at last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact.
I have spoken of the h.o.m.ogeneity of the American people during the Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of Mark Twain"s humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly h.o.m.ogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we have somehow all "been there." When [our humor] mentions hash we smile because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile _because_!
In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain"s success. The "cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and even, if the truth were known, to cry b.l.o.o.d.y murder. That was Mark Twain"s habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small hara.s.sments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, all the American people of Mark Twain"s time were exasperated by the same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain"s humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because"
that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all "been there,"" a phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the demands of the typical American of Mark Twain"s time, the demands he made upon his environment, had become, _pari pa.s.su_, progressively more stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment favorable for a regime of commercial exploitation. Wasn"t the "man who has risen," the typical American, himself a business man?
Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general "levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation was practically organized--by a sort of common consent--on the plan of a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and aesthetic development in the individual that would have r.e.t.a.r.ded or compromised the success of the business regime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark Twain"s humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to the efficiency of this business regime, because it helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the Western pioneer.
As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business man"s writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the "strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic cooperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts for the business man"s proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map."
Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional freedom implies a r.e.t.a.r.dation of the business man"s mental machinery, a r.e.t.a.r.dation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain"s humor does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought--and especially irreverent toward them!--when they gave him a seat below the salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and absurd everything of a spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual nature the recognition of which, the partic.i.p.ation in which, would r.e.t.a.r.d the smooth and simple operation of the business man"s mind, Mark Twain, as we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being.
That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all these respects, Mark Twain"s humor affords that "economy of expenditure in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much as the pioneer.
Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain"s humor: let us see whether they corroborate this argument.
In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself seated directly behind a young girl:
How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams,--no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young figure like a fish"s skin, and it was rippled over with the gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaped her thought,--and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just _know_ I"ve got five hundred fleas on me!"
This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no longer disturb the reader"s thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a b.u.t.terfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions.
Another example, the famous "sophagus" hoax in the opening paragraph of "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story":
It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary sophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of G.o.d.
We scarcely need Mr. Paine"s a.s.surance that "the warm light and luxury of this paragraph are facetious. The careful reader will note that its various accessories are ridiculously a.s.sociated, and only the most careless reader will accept the sophagus as a bird." Mark Twain"s sole and wilful purpose, one observes, is to disturb the contemplation of beauty, which requires an emotional effort, to degrade beauty and thus divert the reader"s feeling for it.
To degrade beauty, to debase distinction and thus to simplify the life of the man with an eye single to the main chance--that, one would almost say, is the general tendency of Mark Twain"s humor. In almost every one of his sallies, as any one can see who examines them, he burns the house down in order to roast his pig--he destroys, that is to say, an entire complex of legitimate pretensions for the sake of puncturing a single sham. And, as a rule, even the "shams" are not shams at all; they are manifestations of just that personal, aesthetic or moral distinction which any but a bourgeois democracy would seek in every way to cherish.
Consider, for example, the value a.s.sailed in his famous speech on General Grant and his big toe. The effect of Mark Twain"s humorous a.s.sault on the dignity of General Grant was to reduce him not to the human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a democratic regime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain"s humor in this kind is, however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surrept.i.tious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd,"
says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana"s saddle was hung about with leather hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him into my service and fitted him with a plug and made him wear it." Mark Twain"s contemporaries, Mr. Howells among them, liked to imagine that in this fashion he was exposing shams and pretensions; but unhappily for this argument knighthood had been long extinct when Mark Twain undertook his doughty attack upon it, and it had no unworthy modern equivalent. To exalt the plug above the plume was a very easy conquest for our humorist; it was for this reason, and not, as Mark Twain imagined, from any sn.o.bbish self-sufficiency, that the English public failed to be abashed by the book. In this respect, at least, the "Connecticut Yankee"
was an a.s.sault, not upon a social inst.i.tution, but upon the principle of beauty itself, an a.s.sault, moreover, in the very name of the shrewd pioneer business man.
How easy it is now to understand the prodigious success of "The Innocents Abroad," appearing as it did precisely at the psychological moment, at the close of the Civil War, at the opening of the epoch of industrial pioneering, in the hour when the life of business had become obligatory upon every American man! How easy it is to understand why it was so generally used as a guidebook by Americans traveling in Europe!
Setting out only to ridicule the sentimental pretensions of the author"s own pseudo-cultivated fellow-countrymen, it ridiculed in fact everything of which the author"s totally uncultivated fellow-countrymen were ignorant, everything for which they wished just such an excuse to be ignorant where knowledge would have contributed to an individual development incompatible with success in business, a knowledge that would have involved an expenditure in thought and feeling altogether too costly for the mind that was fixed upon the main chance. It attacked not only the illegitimate pretensions of the human spirit but the legitimate pretensions also. It expressly made the American business man as good as t.i.tian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind were things not worth wasting one"s emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in civilization, of modern America. "I find your people--your best people, I suppose they are--very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant--only talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells"s novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a pa.s.sion for Italy; but they don"t seem interested in their own country. I can"t make it out." It was true, true at least of the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain"s dash of cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as definitely as Whitman"s "Leaves of Gra.s.s," the opening of the national consciousness of which every one hopes such great things in the future. But, unlike "Leaves of Gra.s.s,"
having served to open it, it served also to postpone its fruition. Its whole tendency ran precisely counter to Whitman"s, in sterilizing, that is to say, instead of promoting, the creative impulses in the individual. It b.u.t.tressed the feeble confidence of our busy race in a commercial civilization so little capable of commanding the true spiritual allegiance of men that they could not help anxiously enquiring every traveling foreigner"s opinion of it. Here we have the measure of its influence both for good and for evil. That influence was good in so far as it helped to concentrate the American mind upon the problems and the destinies of America; it was evil, and it was mainly evil, in so far as it contributed to a national self-complacency, to the prevailing satisfaction of Americans with a banker"s paradise in which, as long as it lasts, the true destinies of America will remain unfulfilled.
So much for the nature and the significance of Mark Twain"s humor. I think we can understand now the prodigious practical success it brought him. And are we not already in a position to see why the role of humorist was foreign to his nature, why he was reluctant to adopt it, why he always rebelled against it, and why it arrested his own development?
Obviously, in Mark Twain, the making of the humorist was the undoing of the artist. It meant the suppression of his aesthetic desires, the degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How can a man everlastingly check his natural impulses without in the end becoming the victim of his own habit?
I have spoken of the "Connecticut Yankee." We know how Mark Twain loved the tales of Sir Thomas Malory: they were to him a lifelong pa.s.sion and delight. As for "knightly trappings," he adored them: think of his love for gorgeous costumes, of the pleasure he found in dressing up for charades, of the affection with which he wrote "The Prince and the Pauper"! When, therefore, in his valiant endeavor to "extinguish knighthood," he sends Sir Ozana about the country laying violent hands on wandering knights and clapping plug-hats on their heads he is doing something very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more advanced aesthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually "taking things down" is that one remains "down" oneself, and beauty becomes more and more inaccessibly "up." That is why, in the presence of art, Mark Twain always felt, as he said, "like a barkeeper in heaven."
In destroying what he was constrained to consider the false pretensions of others, he destroyed also the legitimate pretensions of his own soul.
Thus his humor, which had originally served him as a protective coloration against the consequences of the creative life, ended by stunting and thwarting that creative life and leaving Mark Twain himself a scarred child.
He had, to the end, the intuition of another sort of humor. "Will a day come," asks Satan, in "The Mysterious Stranger," "when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage." It was satire that he had in mind when he wrote these lines, the great purifying force with which nature had endowed him, but of the use of which his life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the "sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his "high-pressure intellectual engine." Let us follow the metaphor by saying that Mark Twain permitted the steam in his system to escape as fast as it was generated: he permitted it to escape instead of harnessing it till the time was ripe to "blow to rags and atoms" that world of humbug against which he chafed all his life. But he had staked everything upon the dream of happiness; and humor, by affording him an endless series of small a.s.suagements, enabled him to maintain that equilibrium. "I am tired to death all the time," he wrote in 1895, out of the stress of his financial anxieties. With that in mind we can appreciate the unconscious irony in Mr. Paine"s comment: "Perhaps, after all, it was his comic outlook on things in general that was his chief life-saver."
CHAPTER X
LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN
"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies."
_A Double-Barrelled Detective Story_.
"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant intention of Mark Twain"s genius, the role which he was, if one may say so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr.
Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emanc.i.p.ator, that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the wish for the deed?
What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Moliere holding up to the measure on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the intelligence the forces of darkness and superst.i.tion: it is a criticism of the spirit of one"s age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist"s view of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so?
Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin."
It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and even flattered it.
If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediaevalism of sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric clay-bank: many of the vertebrae are missing, other parts have crumbled away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature.
But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in a.s.suming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been.
When we consider how many of Mark Twain"s yarns and anecdotes, the small change as it were of his literary life, had for their b.u.t.t the petty aspects of the tribal morality of America--Sabbath-breaking, the taboos of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard"s Almanac, we can see that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents" worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day"s a penny a year,"" and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One was "Pilgrim"s Progress," about a man that left his family, it didn"t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and it didn"t cool it a bit, neither, the way I"ve seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these pa.s.sages indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the satirist"s opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can subst.i.tute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in h.e.l.l, where it belongs." And consider this grave conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made progress--the first progress in "ages and ages"--colossal progress. In what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is a vast change (due to them) in ideals--do you admire it? All Europe and all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme ideal--all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations named. Money-l.u.s.t has always existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This l.u.s.t has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of Mark Twain"s spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his friends were the unconscious agents of the business regime, bent upon deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering?
Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had a.s.sumed into the role that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what did he not have to submit? "We shall have b.l.o.o.d.y work in this country some of these days when the lazy _canaille_ get organized. They are the sp.a.w.n of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the att.i.tude of Mark Twain"s intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read "The Age of Reason"": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in G.o.dly Brooklyn as late as 1906.
If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have been thought of Mark Twain"s other opinions? Even the t.i.tle he suggested for his first important book--"The New Pilgrim"s Progress"--was regarded in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same gentlemen who later became Mark Twain"s neighbors and daily a.s.sociates: it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose "community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to attack them?
His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches,"
that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law"s loan, to the readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to a.s.sure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he could not be too circ.u.mspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men"
lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not noticing these little spots on the American sun?
In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief embarra.s.sment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been the want of ill.u.s.tration. In a state where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its devasting irony about every American inst.i.tution save family life--Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain"s final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so--for the story was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford--by making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner?
"Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the ma.s.ses, brought Warner a return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the West.
Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"--not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as "a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinp.r.i.c.k in the dark; and we know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, "that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the "Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine"s biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to estimate the sanct.i.ty of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, in his private memoranda--"do right and you will be conspicuous."
Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain"s intention and failure in his predestined role, the "Connecticut Yankee"
itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works.
Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in writing it.
What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn."
No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet.
Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always have been slightly irritating--he was irritating even at home, and how much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw red. An animadversion upon General Grant"s grammar was an attack upon General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, an attack upon America _and_ upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book as the publisher of General Grant, upon his _amour-propre_ as the countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the a.s.sault like a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a typical Huck Finn att.i.tude: he doubled his fists and said, "You"re another!"--just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in h.e.l.l," he set to work to put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn"t tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker"s inferior." In short, he covered both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole English race, indeed, to come and knock them off.
Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain"s failure as a satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, unconsciously, into a sort of _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ of all his actual personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of the Yankee mechanic"s soul, if only because in his eyes they were sufficiently ridiculous already--England and the Middle Ages.
Could we have a better ill.u.s.tration of the betrayal of Mark Twain"s genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH--A Father Killed by His Son, A b.l.o.o.d.y Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Ma.s.sacre, Two to Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)--and I give you my word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don"t appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of Mark Twain"s humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being possessed with an exclusive public pa.s.sion to "pry the English nation up to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn"t it strange to see the inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about that. But isn"t it curious how automatically his anger was deflected from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of s.p.a.ce itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he calls the master pa.s.sion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace--_the approval of his neighbors and the public_. And perhaps there is something which he dreads more than he dreads pain--the _disapproval_ of his neighbors and the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated cla.s.ses.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game--the ma.s.ses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his n.o.ble purpose to "pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles of simple folk! They are the most successful of all.
The ironical part of this story--for it is worth pursuing--is that Mark Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr.