For if, observe, Mark Twain's first counselors at home had been plain men of business, with an eye single to returns in cash, he might have seen a light and made a stand against the career of self-exploitation into which he was drifting. It would not have been easy: from the moment when "The Jumping Frog" had "set all New York in a roar," business agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward—these must have been great names to the Nevada miner of the sixties. One was a diplomat, one a clergy-man, one a writer; their national prestige was not based upon money; to Mark Twain they could not have seemed anything less than masters, in some degree, of the life of the spirit. And all their influence corroborated the choice Mark Twain had already made.
It was during the "flush times" in Virginia City that he had met Artemus Ward who, on the pinnacle of his career, was, for all that little Nevada world, the very symbol of the literary life itself. "Clemens," we are told, "measured himself by this man who had achieved fame, and perhaps with good reason concluded that Ward's estimate was correct, that he too could win fame and honor, once he got a start." We can see what Ward's counsel had been: he had accepted Mark Twain, not as a creative spirit with possibilities of inner growth before him—what could Artemus Ward have known about such things?—but as an embryonic institution, so to speak, as a "going concern," a man who had already capitalized himself and wanted only a few practical hints. Concretely he told him that he ought to "extend his audience eastward." Burlingame's advice was subtler, but it came to much the same thing. "You have great ability," said he; "I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement of association. Seek companionship among men of superior intellect and character. Refine yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend—into life and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and "extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never forgot," we are told, "that advice" of Anson Burlingame: indeed, he acted upon it immediately by associating himself with the "choice and refined party" of the Quaker City excursion which led him to the feet of his future wife. But it led him first to the feet of Henry Ward Beecher, the most celebrated spiritual leader in all America. What bread and wine did Beecher offer to the unworldly poet in him? "Now here," said he—Mark Twain reports the interview in one of his letters, "now here, you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—but in matters of business I don't suppose you know more than enough to come in when it rains. I'll tell you what to do and how to do it." And thereupon this priest of the ideal sat him down and showed him how to make a contract for "The Innocents Abroad" in which his percentage was a fifth more than the most opulent publishing house in the country had ever paid any author except Horace Greeley. Such were the lessons in self-help this innocent soul received from the wise men of statecraft, literature and divinity.
Thus Mark Twain was inducted into the Gilded Age, launched, in defiance of that instinct which only for a few years was to allow him inner peace, upon the vast welter of a society blind like himself, like him committed to the pursuit of worldly success.
That in becoming a humorist he had relinquished his independence as a creative spirit we can see from his general attitude toward his career. He had lapsed for good and all into a state of what is called moral infantility. We know that the rôle of laugh-maker had, from early adolescence, come, as people say, natural to him. At sixteen, in Hannibal, when he told the story of Jim Wolfe and the cats, "his hearers laughed immoderately," says Mr. Paine, "and the story-teller was proud and happy in his success." At twenty, at a printers' banquet in Keokuk, where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to a métier in which he could exercise the instinct of workmanship, of craftsmanship, is the outstanding fact of Mark Twain's adolescence. It was the earnest of the artist in him: his humor was the line of least resistance. When he adopted humor as a profession, therefore, he was falling back upon a line he had previously rejected, and this implied that he had ceased to be the master of his own destiny. In short, the artist in him having failed to take the helm, he had become a journalist, and his career was now at the mercy of circumstance.
Glance forward a little. After the triumph of "The Innocents Abroad," he wrote to his publisher: "I have other propositions for a book, but have doubted the propriety of interfering with good newspaper engagements, except my way as an author could be demonstrated to be plain before me." To which Mr. Paine adds, specifically: "In spite of the immense success of his book—a success the like of which had scarcely been known in America—Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of Clemens's fiftieth year, when his vital powers seem to have been at their highest point: "As Mark Twain in the earlier days of his marriage had temporarily put aside authorship to join in a newspaper venture, so now again literature had dropped into the background, had become an avocation, while financial interests prevailed." Financial interests!—there were whole years during which he thought of hardly anything else.
This conception of his literary career as interchangeable, so to say, with his financial career is borne out by his thoroughly journalistic attitude toward his work. Thus we find him at the outset proposing to "follow up" his success with the story of the "Hornet" disaster with a series of articles on the Sandwich Islands, and then to "take advantage of the popularity of the Hawaiian letters and deliver a lecture on the same subject." While he was writing "Roughing It" he planned a book of adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and so impersonal was this work that he proposed that the material for it should be gathered by an agent, whom he actually despatched. Then, says Mr. Paine, "the success of 'Roughing It' naturally made him cast about for other autobiographical material." Years later, after the failure of the Paige machine, in which he had invested all his money, we find him returning to literature and counting up his "assets," exactly as if his literary life were indeed a business enterprise. "I confined myself to the boy-life out on the Mississippi," he writes, "because that had a peculiar charm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various rôles he has played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There was nothing new in that story"—"The American Claimant"—"but the finger-prints in this one is virgin ground—absolutely fresh, and mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied a sale of 300,000 sets of General Grant's "Memoirs" and then proceeded to sell almost exactly that number, knew very well what the public wanted: that had become his chief study. Habitually, in connection with what he was planning to do, he used the word "possibilities"—the possibilities of this, the possibilities of that—in the commercial, not in the artistic, sense; he appears always to have been occupied with the promise of profit and reputation a theme contained for him, never with its elements of artistic interest and value. That authorship was to him, in fact, not an art but a trade, and only the chief trade of a series that he had followed, in true pioneer fashion, that he thought of it not as a means of free individual expression but as something naturally conditioned by the laws of supply and demand, all the evidence of his life goes to show. I have quoted his eulogy of the old Mississippi pilot and his description of the writer, by contrast, as "a manacled servant of the public": "we write frankly and fearlessly," he adds, naïvely, "but then we 'modify' before we print." One might imagine that such a thing as an artist had never existed.
Am I anticipating? Go back now; go back to 1867, to the moment of Mark Twain's Cooper Union lecture, when he finds himself, in the hands of his agent Fuller, advertised to "play against Speaker Colfax at Irving Hall, Ristori, and also the double troupe of Japanese jugglers." Mark Twain hesitates. Fuller is obdurate. "What we want this time," he says, "is reputation anyway—money is secondary." So he floods the house with complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of the city. "Mark," he says, after the lecture is over, "Mark, it's all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the country." It was true. But in that moment—that typical moment, in that reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes to his mother: "You observe that under a cheerful exterior I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt"; it is a formidable spirit, that alter ego within him,—he is going to hear its bitter promptings later on. Now, however, his triumph drowns its voice: his private, personal and domestic interests have wholly supplanted the dim and wavering sense of his vocation. "Clemens was chiefly concerned over two things," says Mr. Paine; "he wished to make money and he wished to secure a government appointment for Orion."
Mark Twain often spoke of the rigidity of determinism, of the inexorable sequence of cause and effect. As Mr. Paine says—with an emphasis of his own—he had but to review his own life for justification of his belief. From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called adaptation to environment. He had abdicated that spiritual independence without which the creative life is impossible. He was to "lose himself" now, to quote Whitman's phrase, in "countless masses of adjustments."