The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

THE CANDIDATE FOR GENTILITY

"Follow his call? Good heavens! That is what men do as bachelors; but an engaged man only follows his bride."

IBSEN: The Comedy of Love.

The Free-Thinkers' Society in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," as I have recalled, consisted of two members, Judge Driscoll, the president, and Pudd'nhead himself. "Judge Driscoll," says our author, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community, and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own notions." As for Pudd 'nhead, with his crazy calendar, he was a sort of outcast, anyway; no one cared a straw what Pudd'nhead believed. It was Mark Twain's little paraphrase, that fable, of Tocqueville's comment: "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." Mark Twain has corroborated this, in so many words, himself: "in our country," he says, "we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the prudence never to practise either." An American can have a mind of his own, in short, upon one of two conditions only: either he must be willing to stay at the bottom of the ladder of success or he must be able to climb to the top. No one cares to impugn a fool; no one dares to impugn a captain of industry.

Now when Mark Twain abdicated his independence as a creative spirit, he put his foot on the first rung of that ladder. The children of light are all Pudd'nheads in the eyes of the children of this world, and if Mark Twain had been able and willing to remain in the ranks of the children of light he would have been perfectly free—to starve and to shine. But once he had made his bid for success, he had to accept its moral consequences. The freedom he had lost at the foot of the ladder he could hope to regain only at the top. Meanwhile he had to play the recognized American game according to the recognized American rules.

Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in prestige, stood to him in loco parentis; and, to complete the ironic circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody."

The list of those to whom he deferred is a long and varied one. In later years, "he did not always consult his financial adviser, Mr. Rogers," we are told, "any more than he always consulted his spiritual adviser Twitchell, or his literary adviser Howells, when he intended to commit heresies in their respective provinces." But these were the exceptions that proved the rule: in general, Mark Twain abandoned himself to the will and word of those who had won his allegiance. There was Artemus Ward, there was Anson Burlingame, there was Henry Ward Beecher: what they told him, and how he obeyed, we have just seen. There was Bret Harte, who, he said, "trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesquenesses to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." Above all, and among many others, there was Mr. Howells, who, from the first moment, "won his absolute and unvarying confidence in all literary affairs": indeed, adds Mr. Paine, "in matters pertaining to literature and to literary people in general he laid his burden on William Dean Howells from that day." It was to Howells that he said, apropos of "The Innocents Abroad": "When I read that review of yours I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white." It has become the custom with a certain school of critics to assert that Mark Twain's spiritual rights were in some way infringed by his associates and especially by his wife, the evident fact being that he craved authority with all the self-protective instinct of the child who has not learned safely to go his own way and feels himself surrounded by pitfalls. "There has always been somebody in authority over my manuscript and privileged to improve it," he wrote in 1900, with a touch of angry chagrin, to Mr. S.S. McClure. But the privilege had always emanated from Mark Twain himself.

In short, having lost the thread of his life and committed himself to the pursuit of prestige, Mark Twain had to adapt himself to the prevailing point of view of American society. "The middle class," says a contemporary English writer, Mr. R.H. Gretton, "is that portion of the community to which money is the primary condition and the primary instrument of life"; if that is true, we can understand why Matthew Arnold observed that the whole American population of his time, belonged to the middle class. When, accordingly, Mark Twain accepted the spiritual rule of the majority, he found himself leading, to use an expression of bridge-players, from his weakest suit. It was not as a young writer capable of great artistic achievements that he was valued now, but as a promising money-maker capable of becoming a plutocrat. And meanwhile, instead of being an interesting individual, he was a social inferior. His uncouth habits, his lack of education, his outlandish manners and appearance, his very picturesqueness—everything that made foreigners delight in him, all these raw materials of personality that would have fallen into their natural place if he had been able to consummate his freedom as an artist, were mill-stones about the neck of a young man whose salvation depended upon his winning the approval of bourgeois society. His "outrageousness," as Mr. Howells calls it, had ceased to be the sign of some priceless, unformulated force; it had become a disadvantage, a disability, a mere outrageousness! That gift of humor was a gold-mine—so much every one saw: Mark Twain was evidently cut out for success. But he had a lot of things to live down first! He was, in a word, a "roughneck" from the West, on probation; and if he wanted to get on, it was understood that he had to qualify. We cannot properly grasp the significance of Mark Twain's marriage unless we realize that he had been manœuvered into the rôle of a candidate for gentility.

But here, in order to go forward, we shall have to go back. What had been Mark Twain's original, unconscious motive in surrendering his creative life? To fulfill the oath he had taken so solemnly at his dead father's side; he had sworn to "make good" in order to please his mother. In short, when the artist in him had abdicated, the family man, in whom personal and domestic interests and relations and loyalties take precedence of all others, had come to the front. His home had ever been the hub of Mark Twain's universe: "deep down," says Mr. Paine, of the days of his first triumphs in Nevada, "he was lonely and homesick; he was always so away from his own kindred." And at thirty-two, able to go back to his mother "without shame," having at last retrieved his failure as a miner, he had renewed the peculiar filial bond which had remained precisely that of his infancy. Jane Clemens was sixty-four at this time, we are told, "but as keen and vigorous as ever—proud (even if somewhat, critical) of this handsome, brilliant man of new name and fame who had been her mischievous, wayward boy. She petted him, joked with him, scolded him, and inquired searchingly into his morals and habits. In turn, he petted, comforted and teased her. She decided that he was the same Sam, and always would be—a true prophecy." It, was indeed so true that Mark Twain, who required authority as much as he required affection, could not; fail now to seek in the other sex some one who would take his mother's place. All his life, as we know, he had to be mothered by somebody, and he transferred this filial relation to at least one other person before it found its bourn first in his wife and afterward in his daughters. This was "Mother" Fairbanks of the Quaker City party, who had, we are told, so large an influence on the tone and character of those travel letters which established his fame. "She sewed my buttons on," he wrote—he was thirty-two at the time—"kept my clothing in presentable form, fed me on Egyptian jam (when I behaved), lectured me awfully ... and cured me of several bad habits." It was only natural, therefore, that he should have accepted the rule of his wife "implicitly," that he should have "gloried," as Mr. Howells says, in his subjection to her. "After my marriage," he told Professor Henderson, "she edited everything I wrote. And what is more—she not only edited my works—she edited me!" What, indeed, were Mark Twain's works in the totality of that relationship? What, for that matter, was Olivia Clemens? She was more than a person, she was a symbol. After her death Mark Twain was always deploring the responsibility he had been to her. Does he not fall into the actual phrase his mother had used about him?—"she always said I was the most difficult child she had." She was, I say, more than a person, she was a symbol; for just as she had taken the place of his mother, so at her death her daughters took her place. Mr. Paine tells how, when Mark Twain was seventy or more, Miss Clara Clemens, leaving home for a visit, would pin up a sign on the billiard-room door: "No billiards after 10 P.M."—a sign that was always outlawed. "He was a boy," Mr. Paine says, "whose parents had been called away, left to his own devices, and bent on a good time." He used to complain humorously how his daughters were always trying to keep him straight—"dusting papa off," as they called it, and how, wherever he went, little notes and telegrams of admonition followed him. "I have been used," he said, "to obeying my family all my life." And by virtue of this lovable weakness, too, he was the typical American male.

As we can see now, it was affection rather than material self-interest that was leading Mark Twain onward and upward. It had always been affection! He had never at bottom wanted to "make good" for any other reason than to please his mother, and in order to get on he had had to adopt his mother's values of life; he had had to repress the deepest instinct in him and accept the guidance of those who knew the ropes of success. As the ward of his mother, he had never consciously broken with the traditions of Western society. Now, a candidate for gentility on terms wholly foreign to his nature, he found the filial bond of old renewed with tenfold intensity in a fresh relationship. He had to "make good" in his wife's eyes, and that was a far more complicated obligation. As we shall see, Mark Twain rebelled against her will, just as he had rebelled against his mother's, yet could not seriously or finally question anything she thought or did. "He adored her as little less than a saint," we are told: which is only another way of saying that, automatically, her gods had become his.

It is not the custom in American criticism to discuss the relations between authors and their wives: so intensely personal is the atmosphere of our society that to "stoop and botanize" upon the family affairs even of those whose lives and opinions give its tone to our civilization is regarded as a sort of sacrilege. Think of the way in which English criticism has thrashed out the pros and cons of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Percy and Harriet Shelley, Lord and Lady Byron, and the Bronte family and the Lambs and the Rossettis! Is it to satisfy the neighborly village ear or even a mere normal concern with interesting relationships? At bottom English critics are so copious and so candid in these domestic analyses because they believe that what great writers think and feel is of profound importance to society and because they know that what any man thinks and feels is largely determined by personal circumstances and affections. It is, no doubt, because of this frank, free habit of mind that all the best biographies even of our American worthies—Hamilton, Franklin and Lincoln, for instance—have been written by Englishmen! No one will deny, I suppose, that Mark Twain's influence upon our society has been, either in a positive or in a negative way, profound. When, therefore, we know that, by his own statement, his wife not only edited his works but edited him, we feel slightly annoyed with Mr. Howells who, whenever he speaks of Mrs. Clemens, abandons his rôle as a realist and carefully conceals that puissant personage under the veil of "her heavenly whiteness." We feel that the friend, the neighbor, the guest has prevailed in Mr. Howells's mind over the artist and the thinker and that he is far more concerned with fulfilling his personal obligations and his private loyalties than the proper public task of a psychologist and a man of letters. Meanwhile, we know that neither the wives of European authors nor, for that matter, the holy women of the New Testament have suffered any real degradation from being scrutinized as creatures of flesh and blood. If one stoops and botanizes upon Mrs. Clemens it is because, when her standards became those of her husband, she stepped immediately into a rôle far more truly influential than that of any President.