LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN
"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies."A Double-Barrelled Detective Story.
"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle which he was, if one may say so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the wish for the deed?
What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up to the measure on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin."
It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and even flattered it.
If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been.
When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty aspects of the tribal morality of America—Sabbath-breaking, the taboos of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made progress—the first progress in 'ages and ages'—colossal progress. In what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is a vast change (due to them) in ideals—do you admire it? All Europe and all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme ideal—all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his friends were the unconscious agents of the business régime, bent upon deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering?
Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country some of these days when the lazy canaille get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read 'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested for his first important book—"The New Pilgrim's Progress"—was regarded in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose "community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to attack them?
His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not noticing these little spots on the American sun?
In "The Gilded Age," it is true, his first and only novel, he seems frank enough. One remembers the preface of that book: "It will be seen that it deals with an entirely ideal state of society; and the chief embarrassment of the writers in this realm of the imagination has been the want of illustration. In a state where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity, and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out of an ideal commonwealth." That is fairly explicit and fairly animated, even if it is only a paragraph from a preface; and in fact the whole background of the story, from the capital city, that "grand old benevolent national asylum for the Helpless," down, with its devasting irony about every American institution save family life—Congress, the law, trial by jury, journalism, business, education and the Church, East and West alike, almost prepares us for Mark Twain's final verdict regarding the "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust." And yet the total effect of the book is idyllic; the mirage of the America Myth lies over it like a rosy veil. Mark Twain might permit himself a certain number of acid glances at the actual face of reality; but he had to redeem himself, he wished to redeem himself for doing so—for the story was written to meet the challenge of certain ladies in Hartford—by making the main thread the happy domestic tale of a well brought up young man who finds in this very stubbly field the amplest and the softest straw for the snug family nest he builds in the end. Would he, for that matter, have presumed to say his say at all if he had not had the moral support of the collaboration of Charles Dudley Warner? "Clemens," we are told, "had the beginning of a story in his mind, but had been unwilling to undertake an extended work of fiction alone. He welcomed only too eagerly, therefore, the proposition of joint authorship." Mark Twain, the darling of the masses, brought Warner a return in money such as he probably never experienced again in his life; Warner, the respected Connecticut man of letters, gave Mark Twain the sanction of his name. An admirable combination! A model indeed, one might have thought it, for all New Englanders in their dealings with the West.
Am I exaggerating the significance of what might be taken for an accident? In any case, it was not until that latter period when he was too old and too secure in his seat to fear public opinion quite in this earlier way that he had his revenge in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"—not till then, and then only in a measure did he ever again, openly and on a large scale, attack the spiritual integrity of industrial America. Occasionally, in some little sketch like "The Great Revolution in Pitcairn," where the Presbyterian Yankee is described as "a doubtful acquisition," he ventures a pinprick in the dark; and we know that he sent his "1601" anonymously to a magazine editor who had once remarked, "O that we had a Rabelais!": "I judged," said Mark Twain, "that I could furnish him one." But he had had his fingers burnt too often: he had no intention of persisting. It is notable, therefore, that having begun with contemporary society in "The Gilded Age," he travels backward into the past for his subsequent pseudo-satirical themes: he feels free to express his social indignation only in terms of the seventh century England of the "Connecticut Yankee," the fifteenth century England of "The Prince and the Pauper," the fourteenth century France of "Joan of Arc," the sixteenth century Austria of "The Mysterious Stranger." Never again America, one observes, and never again the present, for the first of these books alone contains anything like a contemporary social implication and that, the implication of the "Connecticut Yankee," is a flattering one. But I am exaggerating. Mark Twain does attack the present in the persons of the Czar and King Leopold, whom all good Americans abhorred. As for his attacks on corruption in domestic politics, on the missionaries in China, was he not, when he at last "spoke out," supported by the leading citizens who are always ready to back the right sort of prophet? Turn to Mr. Paine's biography: you will find Mr. Carnegie, whom he called Saint Andrew, begging Saint Mark for permission to print and distribute in proper form that "sacred message" about the missionaries. Mark Twain knew how to estimate the sanctity of his own moral courage. "Do right," he notes, in his private memoranda—"do right and you will be conspicuous."
Let us take one more instance, the supreme instance, of Mark Twain's intention and failure in his predestined rôle, the "Connecticut Yankee" itself. This was his largest canvas, his greatest creative effort, the most ambitious and in certain respects the most powerful of his works. Nothing could be more illuminating than a glance at his motives in writing it.
What, in the first place, was his ostensible motive? "The book," he says, in a letter to his English publisher, "was not written for America; it was written for England. So many Englishmen have done their sincerest best to teach us something for our betterment that it seems to me high time that some of us should substantially recognize the good intent by trying to pry up the English nation to a little higher level of manhood in turn."
No doubt, if Mark Twain had read this over in cold blood he would have blushed for his own momentary priggishness; it was not characteristic of him to talk about "higher levels of manhood." But he was in a pet. Matthew Arnold had been wandering among us, with many deprecating gestures of those superangelic hands of his. Matthew Arnold must always have been slightly irritating—he was irritating even at home, and how much more irritating when, having visited this country, he chose to dwell upon the rudimentary language of General Grant! Mark Twain saw red. An animadversion upon General Grant's grammar was an attack upon General Grant, an attack upon General Grant was an attack upon America, an attack upon America and upon General Grant was an attack upon Mark Twain, upon his heart as a friend of General Grant, upon his pocket-book as the publisher of General Grant, upon his amour-propre as the countryman of General Grant. The pioneer in him rose to the assault like a bull-buffalo in defense of the herd. Mark Twain relapsed into a typical Huck Finn attitude: he doubled his fists and said, "You're another!"—just as he did a few years later in his reply to Paul Bourget. Then, longing for "a pen warmed-up in hell," he set to work to put those redcoats, Matthew Arnold, King George III, General Cornwallis and all the rest of them, for by this time he was in the full furore of the myth of the American Revolution, in their place. He even began a frantic defense of American newspapers, which at other times he could not revile enough, and filled his note-books with red-hot absurdities like this: "Show me a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior." In short, he covered both shoulders with chips and defied any and every Englishman, the whole English race, indeed, to come and knock them off.
Now here, I say, is the crucial instance of Mark Twain's failure as a satirist. In the moment of crisis the individual in him loses itself in the herd; the intellect is submerged in a blind emotion that leads him, unconsciously, into a sort of bouleversement of all his actual personal intentions. Against his instinct, against his purpose he finds himself doing, not the thing he really desires to do, i.e., to pry up the American nation, if the phrase must be used, "to a little higher level of manhood," which is the true office of an American satirist, but to flatter the American nation and lull its conscience to sleep. In short, instead of doing the unpopular thing, which he really wanted to do, he does the most popular thing of all: he glorifies the Yankee mechanic, already, in his own country, surfeited with glory, and pours ridicule upon the two things that least needed ridicule for the good of the Yankee mechanic's soul, if only because in his eyes they were sufficiently ridiculous already—England and the Middle Ages.
Could we have a better illustration of the betrayal of Mark Twain's genius? If any country ever needed satire it is, and was, America. Did not Mark Twain feel this himself in those rare moments of his middle years when he saw things truly with his own eyes? Let us take from his letters a comment on American society that proves it: "There was absolutely nothing in the morning papers," he writes in 1873: "you can see for yourself what the telegraphic headings were: BY TELEGRAPH—A Father Killed by His Son, A Bloody Fight in Kentucky, An Eight-Year-Old Murderer, A Town in a State of General Riot, A Court House Fired and Three Negroes Therein Shot While Escaping, A Louisiana Massacre, Two to Three Hundred Men Roasted Alive, A Lively Skirmish in Indiana (and thirty other similar headings). The items under those headings all bear date yesterday, April 16 (refer to your own paper)—and I give you my word of honor that that string of commonplace stuff was everything there was in the telegraphic columns that a body could call news. Well, said I to myself, this is getting pretty dull; this is getting pretty dry; there don't appear to be anything going on anywhere; has this progressive nation gone to sleep?" Knowing as we do the significance of Mark Twain's humor, we divine from the tone of these final comments that he already considers it none of his business, that as a writer he proposes to do nothing about it. But his eye is exceedingly wide open to those things! Would not any one say, therefore, that there is something rather singular in the spectacle of a human being living alertly in a land where such incidents were the staple of news and yet being possessed with an exclusive public passion to "pry the English nation up to a little higher level of manhood"? Isn't it strange to see the inhabitant of a country where negroes were being lynched at an average rate of one every four days filled with "a holy fire of righteous wrath," as Mr. Paine says, because people were unjustly hanged in the seventh century? Mark Twain was sincerely angry, there is no doubt about that. But isn't it curious how automatically his anger was deflected from all its natural and immediate objects, from all those objects it might have altered, and turned like an air-craft gun upon the vacuity of space itself? "Perhaps," he says, in "What Is Man?" defining what he calls the master passion, the hunger for self-approval, "perhaps there is something that (man) loves more than he loves peace—the approval of his neighbors and the public. And perhaps there is something which he dreads more than he dreads pain—the disapproval of his neighbors and the public." Mark Twain ate his cake and had it too. He avoided the disapproval of his neighbors by not attacking America; he won their approval by attacking England. Then, as we can see from his famous letter to Andrew Lang, he tried to win the approval of England also by deprecating the opinion of cultivated readers and saying that he only wanted to be taken as a popular entertainer! "I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes.... And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere." That was what became of his noble purpose to "pry up the English nation" when the English nation manifested its objection to being pried up by virtually boycotting the book. The wiles of simple folk! They are the most successful of all.
The ironical part of this story—for it is worth pursuing—is that Mark Twain, the sober individual, had for England an exaggerated affection and admiration. His "first hour in England was an hour of delight," he records; "of rapture and ecstacy." "I would a good deal rather live here if I could get the rest of you over," he writes frankly in 1872; and Mr. Paine adds that, "taking the snug island as a whole, its people, its institutions"—its institutions, observe—"its fair rural aspects, he had found in it only delight." That was true to the end of his days; against a powerful instinct he defended even the Boer War because he so admired the genius of English administration. He had personal reasons for this, indeed, in the affection with which England always welcomed him. "On no occasion in his own country," we are told, of his first English lecture tour, "had he won such a complete triumph"; and how many of those triumphs there were! "As a rule," says Mr. Paine, "English readers of culture, critical readers, rose to an understanding of Mark Twain's literary value with greater promptness than did the same class of readers at home." "Indeed," says Mr. Howells, "it was in England that Mark Twain was first made to feel that he had come into his rightful heritage." Did his feeling for England spring from this? Who can say? But certainly it was intense and profound. Early in his life he planned, as we have seen, a book on England and gave it up because he was afraid its inevitable humor would "offend those who had taken him into their hearts and homes." Why, then, safely enthroned in America, did he, merely because he was annoyed with Matthew Arnold, so passionately desire to "pry" the English nation up? One key to this question we have already found, but it requires a deeper explanation; and the incident of this earlier book suggests it. Mark Twain's literary motives, and it was this, as I have said, that made him the typical pioneer, were purely personal. Emerson wrote his "English Traits" before the Civil War: in reporting his conversation with Walter Savage Landor, he made a remark that could not fail to hurt the feelings of Robert Southey. What was his reason, what was his excuse? That Southey and Landor were public figures and that their values were values of public importance. Emerson, in short, instinctively regarded his function, his loyalties and his responsibilities as those of the man of letters, the servant of humanity. Mark Twain, no less typical of his own half-century, took with him to England the pioneer system of values in which everything was measured by the ideal of neighborliness. If he couldn't write without hurting people's feelings, he wouldn't write at all, for always, like the good Westerner, he thought of his audience as the group of people immediately surrounding him. In America, on the other hand, the situation was precisely reversed. What would please his Hartford neighbors, who had taken him into their hearts and homes?—that was the point now; and they, or the less cultivated majority of them, could not see England, through the eyes of a Connecticut Yankee, damned enough! Something, Mark Twain knew, he wanted to satirize—he was boiling with satirical emotion; and while the artist in him wished to satirize not England but America, the pioneer in him wished to satirize not America but England. And as usual the pioneer won.
Another motive corroborated this decision. "He had published," Mr. Paine tells us, "nothing since the 'Huck Finn' story, and his company was badly in need of a new book by an author of distinction. Also, it was highly desirable to earn money for himself." Elsewhere we read that the "Connecticut Yankee" "was a book badly needed by his publishing business with which to maintain its prestige and profit." Mark Twain, the author, we see, had to serve the prestige and profit of Mark Twain, the publisher; he was obliged, in short, to write something that would be popular with the American masses. How happy that publisher must have been for the provocation Matthew Arnold offered him! Mark Twain, on the top-wave of his own capitalistic undertakings, was simply expressing the exuberance of his own character not as an artist but as an industrial pioneer in the person of that East Hartford Yankee who sets out to make King Arthur's England a "going concern." Who can mistake this animus?— "Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own, not a competitor." Prying up the English nation ends, as we see, with a decided general effect of patting the American nation on the back. The satirist has joined forces with the great popular flood of his generation; he has become that flood; he asks neither the why nor the whither of his going; he knows only that he wants to be in the swim. If, at that moment, the artist in Mark Twain had had only the tail of one eye awake, he would have laughed at the spectacle of himself drawing in dollars in proportion to the magnificence of his noble and patriotic defense of what everybody else, less nobly perhaps, but no less patriotically, was defending also.
"Frankness is a jewel," said Mark Twain; "only the young can afford it." Precisely at the moment when he was writing to Robert Ingersoll that remarkable letter which displayed a thirst for crude atheism comparable only to the thirst for crude alcohol of a man who has been too long deprived of his normal ration of simple beer, he was at work on "Tom Sawyer." "It is not a boys' book, at all," he says. "It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults." Six months later we find him adding: "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls." Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick!
Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there."
Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and cannot employ it.
Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send:
To COLONEL HARVEY.—I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. MARK.
DEAR COLONEL—No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK.
And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that he announced he was going to show it to the Czar:
To COLONEL HARVEY.—I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved it. MARK TWAIN.
Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. 'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation."
Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. "The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of "brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer.
This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding.
Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, "needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006—which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk.
Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists—utterly and entirely—of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of "Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, "until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that is pathology.
Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they invariably led into this cul-de-sac. If life is really futile, then writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it is full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in the air.