The Ordeal of Mark Twain Part 1

The Ordeal of Mark Twain.

by Van Wyck Brooks.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY: MARK TWAIN'S DESPAIR

"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."--_Marginal note in one of Mark Twain's books._

To those who are interested in American life and letters there has been no question of greater significance, 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 modern 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 intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of his "pose" regarding "the d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.sociates, 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 memoranda 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 Messiah 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 illness 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 "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in appointing himself, as he said, "amba.s.sador-at-large of the United States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all official Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 proposing 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 quality 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.dlike 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 suns.h.i.+ne of immortal years, and bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare"?

The spectators of this drama could hardly have been 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 pa.s.sed 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 uniformly 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-hued impulses" on paper, we see him again and again, as Mr. Paine saw him in Was.h.i.+ngton in 1906 when he was expounding the gospel of copyright to the members of Congress a.s.sembled, "happy and wonderfully excited." Can it surprise us then to find him, in his seventy-fifth year, adding to the note about his daughter's death: "Shall I ever be cheerful again, happy again? Yes. And soon. For I know my temperament"?

And his physical health was just what one might 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 1875; 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 forgotten 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 testimony 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 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 G.o.ds. No wonder they were inclined to take his view of "the d.a.m.ned 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 "G.o.d's most elegant invention" as not only "d.a.m.ned" 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, "Gla.s.s Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment."

All his closest friends were accustomed 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 basenesses and hypocricies and cruelties that make up civilization and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the d.a.m.nation 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 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 "Following 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 always 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 baddest 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 princ.i.p.al difference between a 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 Corrupted 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, with its invincible habit of "turning h.e.l.l's back-yard into a playground," gone so far even as to discount "The Mysterious Stranger," that fearful picture of life as a rigmarole of cruel nonsense, a nightmare of Satanic unrealities, with its frank a.s.sertion 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, complexity and interest than the surfaces indicated." But having made this discovery, for he is openly surprised, Professor Sherman merely reveals in his new and unexpected Mark Twain the Mark Twain most people had known before: "What Mark Twain hated was the brutal power resident in monarchies, aristocracies, tribal religions 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 Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations 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 att.i.tude 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 n.i.g.g.e.r Jim? Mark Twain's boys "not manly enough nor brave enough" to do a generous action when 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 pa.s.sed 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 those he loved? No, for these things would have modified 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 anything 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, perhaps, 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 attention. "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 eas.e.m.e.nt for his species." And here again the general leads to the particular. "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 "predicating 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 letters of appreciation and recommendation of the new cure-all: "indeed," says Mr. Paine, "he gave most of 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, unending? No doubt those illnesses provided a constant stimulus to the obsession--the "eclectic therapeutic doctrine," 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 "buoyant 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 "frightened," 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.

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 of 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-eludings" 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 "Romola" the only thing that "hits" him "with force" is t.i.to's compromise with his conscience? Why those continual fits of remorse, those fantastic self-accusations in which he charged himself, we are told, with having 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 daughter 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 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! "You 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 restless 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 possible," which would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and a.s.signs 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 s.h.i.+p, 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, stateliest of Indiamen, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas? Can we call it merely an irony of circ.u.mstance that in his own eyes he was a bit of storm-beaten human drift, a derelict, was.h.i.+ng 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 creative 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 similar 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 intellectual 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, original thinker." And finally, Mr. H.L.

Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one a.s.sociates 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 archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not continue so to be for many generations to comet 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 quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sertion of Henry James that Mark Twain's appeal is an appeal to rudimentary minds. "Huckleberry 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 important, the final expressions of a supreme artistic genius, one of the great novelists of the world, a second Cervantes?

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, 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, Cervantes, 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 "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 thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps 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. "I thought," said one of his a.s.sociates in earlier years, "that the n.o.ble 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. Howells says: "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 combination of barbaric force and intense sweetness, which so many others noted in him--is there not about it something 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, t.i.tanic were the words that came to people's lips when they tried to convey their impression of him, and when he died it seemed for the moment as if one of the fixed stars had fallen in s.p.a.ce.

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 the 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 complacent 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 publis.h.i.+ng his personal memoirs at the expiration of one hundred years, letters covering the details of which were exchanged with his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers. A man who could have proposed this must have felt, at moments anyway, pretty secure of posterity, pretty confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? 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. "Although I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the s.h.i.+p 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 rea.s.surance from what he considered the highest court of culture, that he really was one of the elect.

Yes, that nave pa.s.sion for the limelight, for "walking with kings" and hobn.o.bbing with job lots of celebrities, 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 morning 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 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 pa.s.sing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the mult.i.tude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation." 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 a.s.sociates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"?

Actual kings were with him nothing less than an obsession: kings, empresses, princes, archd.u.c.h.esses--what a part they play in his biography! He is always dragging 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. He 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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_ contributor. Could any American man of letters have had more reason to think well of himself? Observe what he thought. "I haven't as good an opinion of my work as you hold of it," he writes to Mr. Howells in 1887, "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-cla.s.s standard"; he half poses as an uplifter of the ma.s.ses; then, with a touch of mock-n.o.ble indignation, he confesses to being a popular entertainer, 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 a generation, he was a favored equal. But in the intimate presence of some isolated greatness he reverted to the primitive reverence of the candidate for the mystagogue. Was it Emerson? He ceased to be a fellow writer, he became one of the devout Yankee mult.i.tude. Was it Browning?

He forgot the man he had so cordially known in the poet whom he studied for a time with the nave self-abas.e.m.e.nt of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen?

Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin 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 the 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 Gobelins."

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, "Why am I like the Pacific Ocean?" and to answer it thus: "I don't know. I was just asking for information." 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 corroboration from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be a.s.sured that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to rea.s.sure themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually was 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 instinctive 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 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 marvelous coincidences of which he is the subject; he is always being struck by some manifestation of "mental telegraphy"--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 altogether 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 together.' 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 committed 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!

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_ influences, _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 proprietary interest and pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving impulse--the contenting of his own spirit--and is merely a machine and ent.i.tled 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 painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession and in looking the other way when an imploring argument 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 "damaging 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 philosophy gave Mark Twain.