The Ordeal of Mark Twain Part 2

"A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people ... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but, in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none."

Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a sort of channel for all the aesthetic idealism of the Mississippi region?

"When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and s.h.i.+ftlessness for a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pa.s.s up and down." They were indeed "floating enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean--first rate, for once! not second, or third, or fourth--light and bright and gay, radiating a sort of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, its trim vigor. And what an air they had of _going_ somewhere, of _getting_ somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it!

Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of mediocrity, nonent.i.ty, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural pa.s.sion of the novice lavished, for love of the _metier_, upon the only creative--shall I say?--at least the only purposive figure in all his experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It was in this fas.h.i.+on that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another.

"You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing.

I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure aesthetic emotion, produced by a supreme exercise of personal craftsmans.h.i.+p.

Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said in later life, when he used to a.s.sert so pa.s.sionately that man is a mere chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a pa.s.sive agent of his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and dictators.h.i.+p of Circ.u.mstance.... Then Circ.u.mstance arrived with another turning-point of my life--a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other a.s.sertion that to be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited an enthusiastic interest in craftsmans.h.i.+p. "He was a rapid learner and a neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;"

"he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to submit to at any later period of his life.

In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pa.s.s his apprentices.h.i.+p, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his apprentices.h.i.+p was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": "even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade,"

says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, "and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and wors.h.i.+p it! I want a man to--I want _you_ to--take up a line of action, and _follow_ it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the book, "I guess this is where our line starts"?

Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that s.h.i.+ftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a pa.s.sion of eagerness.

Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last.

Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots,"

says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader--a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences--a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know."

Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life"

is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was--as it is--an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it--as though the world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only ill.u.s.trates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit."

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

CHAPTER III

THE GILDED AGE

"The American democracy follows its ascending march, uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as the decrees of eternity."

GEORGE BANCROFT.

You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands, feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river."

Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as the streets of London served d.i.c.kens, as the prison life of Siberia served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior, he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circ.u.mstance steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost.

The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative education, came to an abrupt end.

Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a military t.i.tle only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility, in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river "sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a wors.h.i.+per of energy and purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and 'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would never, in later years, have been led to a.s.sert so pa.s.sionately that man is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of self-determination, was so new to this man who had pa.s.sed his whole adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent, chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated, that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmans.h.i.+p: nothing stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation.

A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, pa.s.sionate young figure of the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see; that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the compulsions of his childhood.

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

What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called it in the t.i.tle of his only novel, the age when presidents were business men and generals were business men and preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors.

Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, science, literature, we know how fas.h.i.+ons change!... What I now find I would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to have acc.u.mulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than be Historian or General or President."

Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one channel pa.s.sed all the religious fervor of the race.

I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is, artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I _must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it!

"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and the Gilded Age is justified in its children.

Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of money-making. Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson once commented on the truly religious character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit"

consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of "another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has become the prophet.

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

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

Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in material wealth, that the inst.i.tution of private property is "bound up"

with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of a.s.sisi, and most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the will of G.o.d, or a historical necessity, but rather a superst.i.tion," he was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: "Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very disgraceful circ.u.mstance that such a man as So-and-so should be acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the other stars.

We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute h.o.m.ogeneity of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that wors.h.i.+p of success, that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great rivers, these rich forests lay there br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with fortune for a race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests were identical and the wors.h.i.+p of success was actually a social cult.

It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute h.o.m.ogeneity of feeling. We were a simple, h.o.m.ogeneous folk before the Civil War and the practical effect of pioneering and the business regime was to keep us so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the h.o.m.ogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The effect of business upon the individual has never been better described than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men--'big' financially--men famous during the last half-century; and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them a.s.sociated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men are one from another in temperament, circ.u.mstances and habits, they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such is the result of the business process, and the success of the process required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere a.s.sertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality, the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical, realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact, one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd.

For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed?

Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an anaesthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny, without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hards.h.i.+ps? One recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a feudal castle, his wife is a chateleine, his children the baron's cubs, and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isingla.s.s of the broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums, "California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting, aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then, boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew, and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to "boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain parts of the West.

Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of criticism, in fact, was regarded as _lese-majeste_ to the folk-spirit of America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and reputation. Who does not remember the story of d.i.c.kens's connection with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers'

Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll,"

says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short, ent.i.tled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary, that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent.

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

Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories.

In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days," he says. "It was an a.s.semblage of two hundred thousand _young_ men--not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans--none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers."

Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening s.p.a.ce, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the life of this New England countryside during the generation that followed--those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants of the male s.e.x, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!--a civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death.

Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole spiritual life of the nation, had pa.s.sed into the condition of a neurotic anaemia in which it has remained so largely to this day.

This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of its higher levels which was ill.u.s.trated in so tragi-comic a way by the unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr.

Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the less they partic.i.p.ated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the conservation of the ideal had pa.s.sed into the hands of women. Ah, it was not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had become the pacemaker in the arts.

One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new regime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, was consecrated to the high priesthood by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life--an incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said.

His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an essentially pa.s.sive and feminine conception of his art; and while his superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate any a.s.sault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide the notion of the artist's role through which he had found his own salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the religious, moral and social taboos of the time.

I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply played into the hands of the business regime? The taboos of the one supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of both s.e.xes and of all cla.s.ses, East and West alike, formed a closed ring as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may a.s.sume, that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry Adams his novel, "Democracy."

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

Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a belated but none the less perfect ill.u.s.tration of the romantic dualism of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect ill.u.s.tration of the romantic dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of decayed faiths, of unconfessed cla.s.s distinctions, of repressed desires, of inarticulate misery--read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's "manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a certain beautiful residuum of truth.