The Ordeal of Mark Twain Part 7

Perhaps if he had not so insisted, in former years, while going over Mark Twain's proofs, upon "having that swearing out in an instant," he would never have had cause to suffer from his having "loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion." Mark Twain's verbal Rabelaisianism was obviously the expression of that vital sap which, not having been permitted to inform his work, had been driven inward and left there to ferment. No wonder he was always indulging in orgies of forbidden words.

Consider the famous book, "1601," that "fireside conversation in the time of Queen Elizabeth": is there any obsolete verbal indecency in the English language that Mark Twain has not painstakingly resurrected and a.s.sembled there? He, whose blood was in constant ferment and who could not contain within the narrow bonds that had been set for him the riotous exuberance of his nature, had to have an escape-valve, and he poured through it a fetid stream of meaningless obscenity--the waste of a priceless psychic material! Mr. Paine speaks of an address he made at a certain "Stomach Club" in Paris which has "obtained a wide celebrity among the clubs of the world, though no line of it, or even its t.i.tle, has ever found its way into published literature." And who has not heard one or two of the innumerable Mark Twain anecdotes in the same vein that are current in every New York publis.h.i.+ng house?

In all these ways, I say, these blind, indirect, extravagant, wasteful ways, the creative self in Mark Twain constantly strove to break through the censors.h.i.+p his own will had accepted, to cross the threshold of the unconscious. "A literary imp," says Mr. Paine, "was always lying in wait for Mark Twain, the imp of the burlesque, tempting him to do the _outre_, the outlandish, the shocking thing. It was this that Olivia Clemens had to labor hardest against." Well she labored, and well Mark Twain labored with her! It was the spirit of the artist, bent upon upsetting the whole apple-cart of bourgeois conventions. They could, and they did, keep it in check; they arrested it and manhandled it and thrust it back; they shamed it and heaped scorn upon it and prevented it from interfering too much with the respectable tenor of their daily search for prestige and success. They could baffle it and distort it and oblige it to a.s.sume ever more complicated and grotesque disguises in order to elude them, but they could not kill it. In ways of which they were unaware it escaped their vigilance and registered itself in a sort of cipher, for us of another generation who have eyes to read, upon the texture of Mark Twain's writings.

For is it not perfectly plain that Mark Twain's books are shot through with all sorts of unconscious revelations of this internal conflict? In the Freudian psychology the dream is an expression of a suppressed wish.

In dreams we do what our inner selves desire to do but have been prevented from doing either by the exigencies of our daily routine, or by the obstacles of convention, or by some other form of censors.h.i.+p which has been imposed upon us, or which we ourselves, actuated by some contrary desire, have willingly accepted. Many other dreams, however, are not so simple: they are often incoherent, nonsensical, absurd. In such cases it is because two opposed wishes, neither of which is fully satisfied, have met one another and resulted in a "compromise"--a compromise that is often as apparently chaotic as the collision of two railway trains running at full speed. These mechanisms, the mechanisms of the "wish-fulfillment" and the "wish-conflict," are evident, as Freud has shown, in many of the phenomena of everyday life. Whenever, for any reason, the censors.h.i.+p is relaxed, the censor is off guard, whenever we are day-dreaming and give way to our idle thoughts, then the unconscious bestirs itself and rises to the surface, gives utterance to those embarra.s.sing slips of the tongue, those "tender playfulnesses," that express our covert intentions, slays our adversaries, sets our fancies wandering in pursuit of all the ideals and all the satisfactions upon which our customary life has stamped its veto. In Mark Twain's books, or rather in a certain group of them, his "fantasies" we can see this process at work. Certain significant obsessions reveal themselves there, certain fixed ideas; the same themes recur again and again. "I am writing from the grave," he notes in later life, regarding some ma.n.u.scripts that are not to be published until after his death. "On these terms only can a man be approximately frank. He cannot be straightly and unqualifiedly frank either in the grave or out of it."

When he wrote "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," "The American Claimant," "Those Extraordinary Twins," he was frank without knowing it. He, the unconscious artist, who, when he wrote his Autobiography, found that he was unable to tell the truth about himself, has conducted us unawares in these writings into the penetralia of his soul.

Let us note, prefatorily, that in each case Mark Twain was peculiarly, for the time being, free of his censors.h.i.+p. That he wrote at least the first draft of "Captain Stormfield" in reckless disregard of it is proved by the fact that for forty years he did not dare to publish the book at all but kept it locked away in his safe. As for "The American Claimant," "Pudd'nhead Wilson," and "Those Extraordinary Twins," he wrote them at the time of the failure of the Paige Typesetting Machine.

Shortly before, he had been on the dizziest pinnacle of worldly expectation. Calculating what his returns from the machine were going to be, he had "covered pages," according to Mr. Paine, "with figures that never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark." Then, suddenly, reduced to virtual bankruptcy, he found himself once more dependent upon authors.h.i.+p for a living. He had pa.s.sed, in short, through a profound nervous and emotional cataclysm: "so disturbed were his affairs, so disordered was everything," we are told, "that sometimes he felt himself as one walking amid unrealities." At such times, we know, the bars of the spirit fall down; people commit all sorts of aberrations, "go off the handle," as we say; the moral habits of a lifetime give way and man becomes more or less an irresponsible animal. In Mark Twain's case, at least, the result was a violent effort on the part of his suppressed self to a.s.sert its supremacy in a propitious moment when that other self, the business man, had proved abysmally weak. That is why these books that marked his return to literature appear to have the quality of nightmares. He has told us in the preface to "Those Extraordinary Twins" that the story had originally been a part of "Pudd'nhead Wilson": he had seen a picture of an Italian monstrosity like the Siamese Twins and had meant to write an extravagant farce about them; but, he adds, "the story changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarra.s.sing circ.u.mstance." Eventually, he realized that it was "not one story but two stories tangled together" that he was trying to tell, so he removed the twins from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and printed the two tales separately.

That alone shows us the confusion of his mind, the confusion revealed further in "The American Claimant" and in "Pudd'nhead Wilson" as it stands. They are, I say, like nightmares, these books: full of pa.s.sionate conviction that turns into a burlesque of itself, angry satire, hysterical humor. They are triple-headed chimeras, in short, that leave the reader's mind in tumult and dismay. The censor has so far relaxed its hold that the unconscious has risen up to the surface: the battle of the two Mark Twains takes place almost in the open, under our very eyes.

Glance now, among these dreams, at a simple example of "wish-fulfillment." When Captain Stormfield arrives in heaven, he is surprised to find that all sorts of people are esteemed among the celestials who have had no esteem at all on earth. Among them is Edward J. Billings of Tennessee. He was a poet during his lifetime, but the Tennessee village folk scoffed at him; they would have none of him, they made cruel sport of him. In heaven things are different; there the celestials recognize the divinity of his spirit, and in token of this Shakespeare and Homer walk backward before him.

Here, as we see, Mark Twain is unconsciously describing the actual fate of his own spirit and that ample other fate his spirit desires. It is the story of Cinderella, the despised step-sister who is vindicated by the prince's favor, rewritten in terms personal to the author. We note the significant parallel that the Tennessee village where the unappreciated poet lived to the scornful amus.e.m.e.nt of his neighbors is a duplicate of the village in which Mark Twain had grown up, the milieu of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

This inference is corroborated by the similar plight of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the sardonic philosopher whom we should have identified with Mark Twain even if the latter had not repeatedly a.s.sured us that an author draws himself in all his characters, even if we did not know that Pudd'nhead's "calendar" was so far Mark Twain's own calendar that he continued it in two later books, "Following the Equator" and "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story." Pudd'nhead, in short, is simply another Edward J. Billings and the village folk treat him in just the same fas.h.i.+on. "For some years," says the author, "Wilson had been privately at work on a whimsical almanac, for his amus.e.m.e.nt--a calendar, with a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form; appended to each date, and the Judge thought that these quips and fancies of Wilson's were neatly turned and cute; so he carried a handful of them around one day, and read them to some of the chief citizens. But irony was not for those people; their mental vision was not focussed for it. They read those playful trifles in the solidest earnest and decided without hesitancy that if there ever had been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead--which there hadn't--this revelation removed that doubt for good and all." And hear how the half-breed Tom Driscoll baits him before all the people in the square: "Dave's just an all-round genius--a genius of the first water, gentlemen; a great scientist running to seed here in this village, a prophet with the kind of honor that prophets generally get at home--for here they don't give shucks for his scientifics, and they call his skull a notion-factory--hey, Dave, ain't it so?... Come, Dave, show the gentlemen what an inspired Jack-at-all-science we've got in this town and don't know it." Is it possible to doubt that here, more than half consciously, Mark Twain was picturing the fate that had, in so real a sense, made a buffoon of him?

Hardly, when we consider the vindictive delight with which he pictures Pudd'nhead out-manuvring the village folk and triumphing over them in the end.

Observe, now, the deadly temperamental earnestness of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," a story written late in life when his great fame and position enabled him to override the censors.h.i.+p and speak with more or less candor. "The temptation and the down-fall of a whole town," says Mr. Paine, "was a colossal idea, a sardonic idea, and it is colossally and sardonically worked out. Human weakness and rotten moral force were never stripped so bare or so mercilessly jeered at in the market-place.

For once Mark Twain could hug himself with glee in derision of self-righteousness, knowing that the world would laugh with him, and that none would be so bold as to gainsay his mockery. Probably no one but Mark Twain ever conceived the idea of demoralizing a whole community--of making its 'nineteen leading citizens' ridiculous by leading them into a cheap, glittering temptation, and having them yield and openly perjure themselves at the very moment when their boasted incorruptibility was to amaze the world." It was the "leading citizens,"

the pillars of society Mark Twain had himself been hobn.o.bbing with all those years, the very people in deference to whom he had suppressed his true opinions, his real desires, who despised him for what he was and admired him only for the success he had attained in spite of it--it was these people, his friends, who had, in so actual a sense, imposed upon him, that he attacks in this terrible story of the pa.s.sing stranger who took such a vitriolic joy in exposing their pretensions and their hypocrisy. "I pa.s.sed through your town at a certain time, and received a deep offense which I had not earned.... I wanted to damage every man in the place, and every woman." Is not that the unmistakable voice of the misprized poet and philosopher in Mark Twain, the worm that has turned, the angel that has grown diabolic in a world that has refused to recognize its divinity?

Here, I say, in these two or three instances, we have the "wish-fulfillment" in its clearest form. Elsewhere we find the wish, the desire of the suppressed poet for self-effectuation, expressing itself in many vague hopes and vague regrets. It is the sentiment of the suppressed poet in all of us that he voices in his letter to Howells about the latter's novel, "Indian Summer"--saying that it gives a body "a cloudy sense of his having been a prince, once, in some enchanted, far-off land, and of being an exile now, and desolate--and Lord, no chance ever to get back there again!" And consider the unfinished tale of "The Mysterious Chamber," "the story," as Mr. Paine describes it, "of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and cannot announce himself. He wanders at last down into subterranean pa.s.sages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation for twenty years." There is something inescapably personal about that.

As for the character of the Colonel Sellers of "The American Claimant"--so different from the Colonel Sellers of "The Gilded Age,"

who is supposed to be the same man and whom Mark Twain had drawn after one of his uncles--every one has noted that it is a burlesque upon his own preposterous business life. Isn't it more than this? That rightful claimant to the great t.i.tle of n.o.bility, living in exile among those fantastic dreams of wealth that always deceive him--isn't he the obscure projection of the lost heir in Mark Twain himself, inept in the business life he is living, incapable of substantiating his claim, and yet forever beguiled by the hope that some day he is going to win his true rank and live the life he was intended for? The shadowy claim of Mark Twain's mother's family to an English earldom is not sufficient to account for his constant preoccupation with this idea.

Just before Mark Twain's death, he recalled, says Mr. Paine, "one of his old subjects, Dual Personality, and discussed various instances that flitted through his mind--Jekyll and Hyde phases in literature and fact." One of his old subjects, Dual Personality! Could he ever have been aware of the extent to which his writings revealed that conflict in himself? Why was he so obsessed by journalistic facts like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case, with its theme of the lost heir and the usurper? Why is it that the idea of changelings in the cradle perpetually haunted his mind, as we can see from "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "The Gilded Age" and the variation of it that const.i.tutes "The Prince and the Pauper"? The prince who has submerged himself in the role of the beggar-boy--Mark Twain has drawn himself there, just as he has drawn himself in the "William Wilson" theme of "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," where he ends by dramatically slaying the conscience that torments him. And as for that pair of incompatibles bound together in one flesh--the Extraordinary Twins, the "good" boy; who has followed the injunctions of his mother and the "bad"

boy of whom society disapproves--how many of Mark Twain's stories and anecdotes turn upon that; same theme, that same juxtaposition!--does he not reveal there, in all its nakedness, as I have said, the true history of his life?

We have observed that in Pudd'nhead's aphorisms Mark Twain was expressing his true opinions, the opinions of the cynic he had become owing to the suppression and the constant curdling as it were of the poet in him. While his pioneer self was singing the praises of American progress and writing "A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur,"

the disappointed poet kept up a refrain like this: "October 12, the discovery. It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to lose it." In all this group of writings we have been discussing, however, we can see that while the censors.h.i.+p had been sufficiently relaxed in the general confusion of his life to permit his unconscious to rise to the surface, it was still vigilant enough to cloak its real intentions. It is in secret that Pudd'nhead jots down his saturnine philosophy; it is only in secret, in a private diary like Pudd'nhead's, that young Lord Berkeley, in "The American Claimant,"

thinks of recording his views of this fraudulent democracy where "prosperity and position const.i.tute rank." Here, as in the malevolent, Mephistophelian "pa.s.sing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," Mark Twain frankly images himself. But he does so, we perceive, only by taking cover behind a device that enables him to save his face and make good his retreat. Pudd'nhead is only a crack-brained fool about things in general, even if he is pretty clever with his finger-print invention--otherwise he would find something better to do than to spend his time writing nonsense; and as for Lord Berkeley, how could you expect a young English sn.o.b to know anything about democracy?

That was the reaction upon which Mark Twain could safely count in his readers; they would only be fooling themselves, of course, they would know that they were fooling themselves: but in order to keep up the great American game of bluff they would have to forgive _him_! As long as he never hit below the belt by speaking in his own person, in short, he was perfectly secure. And Mark Twain, the humorist, who held the public in the hollow of his hand, knew it.

It is only after some such explanation as this that we can understand the supremacy among all Mark Twain's writings of "Huckleberry Finn."

Through the character of Huck, that disreputable, illiterate little boy, as Mrs. Clemens no doubt thought him, he was licensed to let himself go. We have seen how indifferent his sponsors were to the writing and the fate of this book: "n.o.body," says Mr. Paine, "appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly, the publisher." The more indifferent they were, the freer was Mark Twain!

Anything that little vagabond said might be safely trusted to pa.s.s the censor, just because he was a little vagabond, just because, as an irresponsible boy, he could not, in the eyes of the mighty ones of this world, know anything in any case about life, morals and civilization.

That Mark Twain was almost, if not quite, conscious of his opportunity we can see from his introductory note to the book: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." He feels so secure of himself that he can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive!

Huck's illiteracy, Huck's disreputableness and general outrageousness are so many s.h.i.+elds behind which Mark Twain can let all the cats out of the bag with impunity. He must, I say, have had a certain sense of his unusual security when he wrote some of the more cynically satirical pa.s.sages of the book, when he permitted Colonel Sherburn to taunt the mob, when he drew that picture of the audience who had been taken in by the Duke proceeding to sell the rest of their townspeople, when he has the King put up the notice, "Ladies and Children not Admitted," and add: "There if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" The withering contempt for humankind expressed in these episodes was of the sort that Mark Twain expressed more and more openly, as time went on, in his own person; but he was not indulging in that costly kind of cynicism in the days when he wrote "Huckleberry Finn." He must, therefore, have appreciated the license that little vagabond, like the puppet on the lap of a ventriloquist, afforded him. This, however, was only a trivial detail in his general sense of happy expansion, of ecstatic liberation.

"Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't,"

says Huck, on the river; "you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft." Mark Twain himself was free at last!--that raft and that river to him were something more than mere material facts. His whole unconscious life, the pent-up river of his own soul, had burst its bonds and rushed forth, a joyous torrent! Do we need any other explanation of the abandon, the beauty, the eternal freshness of "Huckleberry Finn"?

Perhaps we can say that a lifetime of moral slavery and repression was not too much to pay for it. Certainly, if it flies like a gay, bright, s.h.i.+ning arrow through the tepid atmosphere of American literature, it is because of the straining of the bow, the tautness of the string, that gave it its momentum.

Yes, if we did not know, if we did not feel, that Mark Twain was intended for a vastly greater destiny, for the role of a demiurge, in fact, we might have been glad of all those petty restrictions and misprisions he had undergone, restrictions that had prepared the way for this joyous release. No smoking on Sundays! No "swearing" allowed!

Neckties having to be bothered over! That everlasting diet of Ps and Qs, petty Ps and pettier Qs, to which Mark Twain had had to submit, the domestic diet of Mrs. Clemens, the literary diet of Mr. Howells, those second parents who had taken the place of his first--we have to thank it, after all, for the vengeful solace we find in the promiscuous and general revolt of Huckleberry Finn:

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

"Well, everybody does that way, Huck."

"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I can't _stand_ it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easy. I don't take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fis.h.i.+ng; I got to ask to go in a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything.

Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got to go up in the attic and rip out a while, every day, to git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before folks.... I _had_ to shove, Tom--I just had to.... Now these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I ain't ever going to shake 'em any more...."

This chapter began with the a.n.a.logy of the lion in the circus. You see what happens with Mark Twain when the trainer turns his back.

CHAPTER IX

MARK TWAIN'S HUMOR

"To be good is n.o.ble; but to show others how to be good is n.o.bler and less trouble."

_Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar._

And now we are ready for Mark Twain's humor. We recall how reluctant Mark Twain was to adopt the humorist's career and how, all his life, he was in revolt against a role which, as he vaguely felt, had been thrust upon him: that he considered it necessary to publish his "Joan of Arc"

anonymously is only one of many proofs of a lifelong sense that Mark Twain was an unworthy double of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His humorous writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of his decision was that he obtained from the American public the prodigious and permanent approval which his own craving for success and prestige had driven him to seek. Here, then, are the facts our discussion of Mark Twain's humor-will have to explain. We must see what that humor was, and what produced it, and why in following it he violated his own nature and at the same time achieved such ample material rewards.

It was in Nevada and California that Mark Twain's humor, of which we have evidences during the whole of his adolescence, came to the front; and it is a notable fact that almost every man of a literary tendency who was brought into contact with those pioneer conditions became a humorist. The "funny man" was one of the outstanding pioneer types; he was, indeed, virtually the sole representative of the Republic of Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V.

Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems to have divined this in his description of Western humor. "It is a distinct product," he says. "It grew out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. 'Western humor' was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind it."

Perhaps we can best surprise the secret of this humor by noting Mark Twain's instinctive reaction to the life in Nevada. It is evident that in many ways, and in spite of his high spirits and high hopes, he found that life profoundly repugnant to him: he constantly confesses in his diary and letters, indeed, to the misery it involves. "I do _hate_ to go back to the Washoe," he writes, after a few weeks of respite from mining. "We f.a.g ourselves completely out every day." He describes Nevada as a place where the devil would feel homesick: "I heard a gentleman say, the other day, that it was the 'd----dest country under the sun'--and that comprehensive conception I fully subscribe to. It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye.... Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest--most unadulterated and uncompromising--_sand_." And as with the setting--so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, "the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him": more than once he found it necessary--this young man of twenty-eight--"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel."

That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d----n San Francisco style of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands--"G.o.d, what a contrast with California and the Washoe"!--ever sweet and blessed in his memory.

Never, in short, was a man more rasped by any social situation than was this young "barbarian," as people have called him, by what people also call the free life of the West. We can see this in his profanity, which also, like his humor, came to the front in Nevada and remained one of his prominent characteristics through life. We remember how "mad" he was, "clear through," over the famous highway robbery episode: he was always half-seriously threatening to kill people; he threatened to kill his best friend, Jim Gillis. "To hear him denounce a thing," says Mr.

Paine, "was to give one the fierce, searching delight of galvanic waves"; naturally, therefore, no one in Virginia, according to one of the Gillis brothers, could "resist the temptation of making Sam swear."--Naturally; but from all this we observe that Mark Twain was living in a state of chronic nervous exasperation.

Was this not due to the extraordinary number of repressions the life of pioneering involved? It is true that it was, in one sense, a free life.

It was an irresponsible life, it implied a break with civilization, with domestic, religious and political ties. Nothing could be freer in that sense than the society of the gold-seekers in Nevada and California as we find it pictured in "Roughing It." Free as that society was, nevertheless, scarcely any normal instinct could have been expressed or satisfied in it. The pioneers were not primitive men, they were civilized men, often of gentle birth and education, men for whom civilization had implied many restraints, of course, but innumerable avenues also of social and personal expression and activity to which their natures were accustomed. In escaping responsibility, therefore, they had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, that their s.e.xual lives were either starved or debased; and children were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuality, to conceal their differences and their personal pretensions under the mask of a rough good-fellows.h.i.+p that found expression mainly in the nervously and emotionally devastating terms of the saloon, the brothel and the gambling-h.e.l.l. Mark Twain has described for us the "gallant host" which peopled this hectic scene, that army of "erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones." Where are they now? he asks in "Roughing It." "Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged or decrepit--or shot or stabbed in street affrays--or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts--all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf." We could not have a more conclusive proof of the total atrophy of human nature this old Nevada life entailed.

Innumerable repressions, I say, produced the fierce intensity of that life, which burnt itself out so quickly. We can see this, indeed, in the fact that it was marked by an incessant series of eruptions. The gold-seekers had come of their own volition, they had to maintain an outward equilibrium, they were sworn, as it were, to a conspiracy of masculine silence regarding these repressions, of which, in fact, in the intensity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so common--that they were scarcely worth more than a line or two in the newspaper, and "almost every man" in the town, according to one of his old friends, "had fought with pistols either impromptu or premeditated duels." We have just noted that for Mark Twain this life was a life of chronic nervous exasperation. Can we not say now that, in a lesser degree, it was a life of chronic nervous exasperation for all the pioneers?

But why? What do we mean when we speak of repressions? We mean that individuality, the whole complex of personal desires, tastes and preferences, is inhibited from expressing itself, from registering itself. The situation of the pioneers was an impossible one, but, victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already pointed out, their position was precisely parallel to that of soldiers in the trenches. And, like the soldiers in the trenches, they were always on the verge of laughter, which philosophers generally agree in calling a relief from restraint.

We are now in a position to understand why all the writers who were subjected to these conditions became humorists. The creative mind is the most sensitive mind, the most highly individualized, the most complicated in its range of desires: consequently, in circ.u.mstances where individuality cannot register itself, it undergoes the most general and the most painful repression. The more imaginative a man was the more he would naturally feel himself restrained and chafed by such a life as that of the gold-seekers. He, like his comrades, was under the necessity of making money, of succeeding--the same impulse had brought him there that had brought every one else; we know how deeply Mark Twain was under this obligation, an obligation that prevented him from attempting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised and because to have done so would have required just those expressions of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never "cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them.

"When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job-lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life. There were many practical jokers in the new Territory." After all those years he had not outgrown his instinctive resentment against the a.s.saults to which his dignity had had to submit! To Mark Twain, in short, the life of the gold-fields was a life of almost infinite repression: the fact, as we have seen, that he became a universal b.u.t.t sufficiently proves how large an area of individuality as it were had to submit to the censors.h.i.+p of public opinion if he was to fulfill his pledge and "make good" in Nevada.

Here we have the psychogenesis of Mark Twain's humor. An outlet of some kind that prodigious energy of his was bound to have, and this outlet, since he had been unable to throw himself whole-heartedly into mining, had to be one which, in some way, however obliquely, expressed the artist in him. That expression, nevertheless, had also to be one which, far from outraging public opinion, would win its emphatic approval. Mark Twain was obliged to remain a "good fellow" in order to succeed, in order to satisfy his inordinate will-to-power; and we have seen how he acquiesced in the suppression of all those manifestations of his individuality--his natural freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy--that struck his comrades as "different"

or "superior." His choice of a pen-name, as we have noticed, proves how urgently he felt the need of a "protective coloration" in this society where the writer was a despised type. Too sensitive to relieve himself by horseplay, he had what one might call a preliminary recourse in his profanity, those "scorching, singeing blasts" he was always directing at his companions, and that this in a measure appeased him we can see from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men laughed when they could no longer swear"--as the expression, in short, of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious jokes--and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically--he could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, whose investigations in this field are perhaps the most enlightening we have, the pleasurable effect of humor consists in affording "an economy of expenditure in feeling." It requires an infinitely smaller psychic effort to expel one's spleen in a verbal joke than in a practical joke or a murder, the common method among the pioneers, and it is infinitely safer, too!--a fact that instantly explains the function of the humorist in pioneer society and the immense success of Mark Twain. By means of those jokes of his--("men were killed every week," says Mr. Paine, of one little contest of wit in which he engaged, "for milder things than the editors had spoken each of the other")--his comrades were able, without transgressing the law and the conventions, to vent their own exasperation with the conditions of their life and all the mutual hatred and the destructive desires buried under the att.i.tude of good-fellows.h.i.+p that was imposed by the exigencies of their work. As for Mark Twain himself, the protective coloration that had originally enabled him to maintain his standing in pioneer society ended by giving him the position which he craved, the position of an acknowledged leader.

For, as I have said, Mark Twain's early humor was of a singular ferocity. The very t.i.tles of his Western I sketches reveal their general character: "The Dutch Nick Ma.s.sacre," "A New Crime," "Lionizing Murderers," "The Killing of Julius Caesar 'Localized'," "Cannibalism in the Cars"; he is obsessed with the figure of the undertaker and his labors, and it would be a worthy task for some zealous aspirant for the doctor's degree to enumerate the occasions when Mark Twain uses the phrase "I brained him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was "unsparing in his ridicule of the Governor, the officials in general, the legislative members, and of individual citizens." He became known, in fact, as "a sort of general censor," and the officials, the corrupt officials--we gather that they were all corrupt, except his own painfully honest brother Orion--were frankly afraid of him. "He was very far," said one of his later friends, "from being one who tried in any way to make himself popular." To be sure he was! He was very far even from trying to be a humorist!

Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it--a relief they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticising officials and inst.i.tutions seems to have appeared," the result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the "humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to remain a humorist.

In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech."

Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists of a sort who lack the courage to admit it.