Mark Twain had in him the making of one of the world’s great satirists. He might have made over American civilization, by laughing it out of its shams and pretensions. But he was not permitted to express himself as an artist; he must emulate his father-in-law, the Elmira coal-dealer. The unhappy wretch turned his attention to business ventures, and started a huge publishing business, to publish his own and other books. He sold three hundred thousand copies of General Grant’s Memoirs, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies of other books, utterly worthless from the literary point of view.
He was always at the mercy of inventors with some new scheme to make millions. For example, there was a typesetting machine; he sunk a huge fortune into that, and would spend his time figuring what he was going to make—so many millions that it almost made a billion. He was a wretched business man, and failed ignominously and went into bankruptcy, losing his wife’s money as well as his own. H. H. Rogers, master pirate of Standard Oil, came forward and took charge of his affairs, incidentally playing billiards with him until four o’clock every morning. And then some young radical brought him an exposure of the Standard Oil Company, expecting him to publish this book as a public service!
Going back to Mark Twain’s books, we can read these facts between the lines, and see that he put his balked and cheated self, or some aspect of this self, into his characters. We understand how he poured his soul into Huck Finn; this poor henpecked genius, dressed up and made to go through the paces of a literary lion, yearns back to the days when he was a ragged urchin and was happy; Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer represent all that daring, that escape from the bourgeois world, which Sam Clemens dreamed but never achieved. He put another side of himself into Colonel Sellers, who imagined fortunes; and yet another side into Pudd’nhead Wilson, the village atheist who mocked at the shams of religion. Secretly Mark Twain himself loathed Christianity, and wrote a letter of cordial praise to Robert Ingersoll; but publicly he went to church every Sunday, escorting his saintly wife, according to the customs of Elmira!
The more you read this story the more appalling you find it. This uncrowned king of America built up literally a double personality; he took to writing two sets of letters, one containing what he really wanted to say, and the other what his official public self was obliged to say. He accumulated a volume of “unmailed letters,” one of the weirdest phenomena in literary history. He was indignant at the ending of the Russian-Japanese war, because he believed that if it had continued for a couple of months more the tsar would have been overthrown. When Colonel George Harvey invited him to dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference, he wrote a blistering telegram, in which he declared himself inferior as a humorist to those statesmen who had “turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome comedy.” But he did not send that telegram; he sent another, full of such enraptured praise of the Russian diplomats that Count Witte sent it to the tsar!
That is only one sample out of many. He wrote a War Prayer, a grim satire upon the Christian custom of praying for victory. “I have told the whole truth in that,” he said to a friend; and then added the lamentable conclusion: “Only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.” He explained the reason—this financier who had fortunes to blow in upon mechanical inventions: “I have a family to support, and I can’t afford this kind of dissipation.” And again: “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.”
Of course a man who wrote like this despised himself. It was the tragedy of Tolstoi, but in a far more humiliating form; Tolstoi at least wrote what he pleased, and did in the end break with his family. But Mark Twain stayed in the chains of love and respectability—his bitterness boiling and steaming in him like a volcano, and breaking out here and there with glare and sulphurous fumes. “The damned and mangy human race,” was one of his phrases; and again he wrote: “My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, 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.”
In the effort to excuse himself, this repressed personality evolved a philosophy of fatalism. Man was merely a machine, and could not help doing what he did. This was put into a book, “What is Man?” But then he dared not publish the book! “Am I honest?” he wrote, to a friend. “I give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have suppressed a book, which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I hold it my duty to publish it. There are other difficult tasks I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one.” He did publish the book at last, but anonymously, and with a preface explaining that he dared not sign his name.
He, America’s greatest humorist, had a duty laid upon him; he saw that duty clearly—how clearly we learn from a story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” a ferocious satire upon the human race, published after his death. In this book Satan asks: “Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.” Such was the spiritual tragedy going on in the soul of a man who was going about New York, clad in a fancy white costume, smiled upon and applauded by all beholders, crowned by all critics, wined and dined by Standard Oil millionaires, dancing inexhaustibly until three or four o’clock in the morning, and nicknamed in higher social circles “the belle of New York.”
Mrs. Ogi from Mississippi reads this onslaught upon Mrs. Ogi from Elmira; and her husband wonders a little while he waits. But she only smiles, and remarks: “In our family the men have a traditional saying: ‘It’s all right to be henpecked, but be sure you get the right hen!’”