Olivia Langdon was the daughter of "a wealthy coal-dealer and mine-owner" of Elmira, New York. Perhaps you know Elmira? Perhaps, in any case, you can imagine it? Those "up-State" towns have a civilization all their own: without the traditions of moral freedom and intellectual culture which New England has never quite lost, they had been so salted down with the spoils of a conservative industrial life that they had attained, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a social stratification as absolute as that of New England itself. A stagnant, fresh-water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular sectarianism, eviscerated politics and raw money, ruled the roast, imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to submit to it or to imitate it. Who does not know those august brick-and-stucco Mansard palaces of the Middle States, those fountains on the front lawn that have never played, those bronze animals with their permanent but economical suggestions of the baronial park? The quintessence of thrifty ostentation, a maximum of terrifying effect based upon a minimum of psychic expenditure! They are the Vaticans of the coal-popes of yesteryear, and all the Elmiras with a single voice proclaimed them sacrosanct.
We can imagine how Mark Twain must have been struck dumb in such a presence. "Elmira," says Mr. Paine, "was a conservative place—a place of pedigree and family tradition; that a stranger, a former printer, pilot, miner, wandering journalist and lecturer, was to carry off the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families, was a thing not to be lightly permitted. The fact that he had achieved a national fame did not count against other considerations. The social protest amounted almost to insurrection." One remembers the story of Thomas Carlyle, that Scottish stone-mason's son, who carried off the daughter of Dr. Welsh of Dumfries. One conceives what Carlyle's position would have been if he had not found his own soul before he fell in love, and if Jane Welsh had been merely the passive reflection of a society utterly without respect for the life of the spirit. He would have been, and would have felt himself, the interloper then—he would not have been Carlyle but the stone-mason's son, and she would have been the Lady Bountiful. For Mark Twain had not married an awakened soul; he had married a young girl without experience, without imagination, who had never questioned anything, understood anything, desired anything, who had never been conscious of any will apart from that of her parents, her relatives, her friends. To win her approval and her pride, therefore—and love compelled him to do that—he had to win the approval and the pride of Elmira itself, he had to win the imprimatur of all that vast and intricate system of privilege and convention of which Elmira was the symbol. They had all said of Olivia Langdon, who was the "family idol," that "no one was good enough for her—certainly not this adventurous soldier of letters from the West." Charles Langdon, her brother and Mark Twain's old comrade, was so mortified at having brought this ignominy upon his own household, that he set off on a voyage round the world in order to escape the wedding. Furthermore, Mark Twain's friends in California replied unanimously to Mr. Langdon's enquiries about his character, that, while he was certainly a good fellow, he would make the "worst husband on record." Would not all these things have put any lover on his mettle?
Mark Twain was on probation, and his provisional acceptability in this new situation was due not to his genius but to the fact that he was able to make money by it. What made the Langdons relent and consider his candidacy was quite plainly, as we can see from Mr. Paine's record, the vast success Mark Twain was having as a humorous journalist and lecturer. With the publication of "The Innocents Abroad," as we know, "he had become suddenly a person of substance—an associate of men of consequence": even in New York people pointed him out in the street. He was a lion, a conquering hero, and Elmira could not help yielding to that: "it would be difficult," as Mr. Paine says, "for any family to refuse relationship with one whose star was so clearly ascending." But could he, would he, keep it up? To be sure, he considered himself, we are specifically told, not as a literary man but as a journalist; his financial pace had been set for him; "I wasn't going to touch a book," he wrote, "unless there was money in it, and a good deal of it"; he had already formed those habits of "pecuniary emulation" and "conspicuous waste" which Mr. Veblen has defined for us and which were almost a guarantee that he would take a common-sense view of his talent and turn it to the best financial account; three months before his marriage, this erstwhile barefoot boy was already—the best possible omen for one with his resources—$22,000 in debt! He had put his shoulder to the wheel and had proved that he was able to make money even faster than he spent it; and the instincts of the family man had so manifested themselves in his new devotion that, other things being equal—and his wife would see to that—he really was a safe, conservative risk as a wealthy coal-dealer's son-in-law. Jervis Langdon capitulated: he was a hearty soul, he had always liked Mark Twain, anyway; now he felt that this soldier of fortune could be trusted to cherish his daughter in the style, as people say, to which she had been accustomed. His own household expenses were $40,000 a year: of course they couldn't begin on that scale; it wasn't to be expected, and besides, it wasn't the custom. But, at any rate, he was going to start them off, and he was going to do it handsomely. One remembers how, in "The Gilded Age," when Philip Sterling conquers the mountain of coal that makes his fortune, he "became suddenly a person of consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine," our author adds, naïvely, "have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom." Mark Twain must have had Jervis Langdon in his mind when he wrote that: as an aspirant to fortune, he naturally stood in awe of a man who had so conspicuously arrived, and now that this man had become his own bountiful father-in-law he could not, in his gratitude, sufficiently pledge himself to keep his best financial foot forward. Jervis Langdon gave the young couple a house in a fashionable street in Buffalo, a house newly and fully fitted up, with a carriage and a coachman and all the other appointments of a prosperous ménage. It was a surprise, one of the unforeseen delights of Mark Twain's wedding day!—he woke up, so to speak, and found himself, with the confused and intoxicating sensations of a bridegroom, absolutely committed to a scale of living such as no mere literary man at the outset of his career could ever have lived up to. He had been fairly shanghaied into the business man's paradise! But Jervis Langdon had foreseen everything. Mark Twain's ambition at this time, we are told, "lay in the direction of retirement in some prosperous newspaper enterprise, with the comforts and companionship of a home." That was the ambition, already evoked, which his new situation confirmed, the ambition which had now fully become his because the Langdons encouraged it. And as he had no money actually on hand, his father-in-law bound himself to the extent of $25,000 and advanced half of it in cash so that Mark Twain could acquire a third interest in the Buffalo Express. Thus, almost without realizing it, he had actually become a business man, with love and honor obliging him to remain one.
The full consequences of this moral surrender—shall we call it?—can only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect horror and heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. "Farewell—a long farewell—to business!" he exclaimed during those weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will never touch it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer up—don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. Except when I think of you, dear heart—then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the dirt—whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but no dishonor—and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't convince me!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very ineptitude that ought to have kept him out of business altogether, he was involved more and more deeply in it.
As we can see now, the condition of Mark Twain's survival, on probation as he was and morally pledged to make a large income, was that he should adopt the whole code of his new environment. It was for love's sake that he had put his head, so to say, into the noose; in his case the matrimonial vow had been almost literally reversed and it was he who had promised not only to love and honor but also to obey. His loyalty was laid under further obligations by certain family disasters that followed his marriage and by the weakness of his wife. A neurotic, hysterical type—at sixteen, through a fall upon the ice, she had become a complete invalid, confined to her bed for two years in a darkened room, unable to sit, even when supported, unable to lie in any position except upon her back till a wizard came one day and told her, with miraculous results, to arise and walk—Mrs. Clemens was of an almost unearthly fragility, and she seems to have remained so during the greater part of her life. "I am still nursing Livy night and day. I am nearly worn out," Mark Twain writes, shortly after his marriage; and the death of their first child, not long after, naturally intensified his almost abnormal absorption in domestic interests, his already excessive devotion to his wife. We recall that passionate promise he had made to his brother: "I am in for it. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, then I am done with literature and all other bosh—that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." What chance did he have now, preoccupied at home, driven to support the pretentious establishment his father-in-law had wished on him, to find his own bearings and write to please that "self" which had never possessed any truly conscious existence? The whole tenor of this new life was to feminize Mark Twain, to make him feel that no loyalties are valid which conflict with domestic loyalties, that no activities are admirable which do not immediately conduce to domestic welfare, that private and familiar interests are, rightly and inevitably, the prime interests of man.
"Eve's Diary," written by Mark Twain shortly after his wife's death, is said to figure their relationship: Adam there is the hewer of wood and the drawer of water, a sort of Caliban, and Eve the arbiter in all matters of civilization. "It has low tastes," says Beauty of this Beast. "Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy." And how Mrs. Clemens exercised it! There is something for the gods to bewail in the sight of that shorn Samson led about by a little child who, in the profound somnolence of her spirit, was merely going through the motions of an inherited domestic piety. "Her life had been circumscribed," says Mr. Paine, "her experiences of a simple sort"; but she did not hesitate to undertake "the work of polishing and purifying her life companion. She had no wish to destroy his personality, to make him over, but only to preserve his best, and she set about it in the right way—gently, and with a tender gratitude in each achievement." To preserve his best! "She sensed his heresy toward the conventions and forms which had been her gospel; his bantering, indifferent attitude toward life—to her always so serious and sacred; she suspected that he even might have unorthodox views on matters of religion." That was before they were married: afterward, "concerning his religious observances her task in the beginning was easy enough. Clemens had not at that time formulated any particular doctrines of his own.... It took very little persuasion on his wife's part to establish family prayers in their home, grace before meals, and the morning reading of a Bible chapter." Thus was reëstablished over him that old Calvinistic spell of his mother's, against which he had so vainly revolted as a child: preserving his "best," as we can see, meant preserving what fitted into the scheme of a good husband, a kind father and a sagacious man of business after the order of the Jervis Langdons of this world, for Olivia Clemens had never known any other sort of hero. "In time," says Mr. Paine, with a terrible unconscious irony, "she saw more clearly with his vision, but this was long after, when she had lived more with the world, had become more familiar with its larger needs, and the proportions of created things." It was too late then; the mischief had long been done. Mark Twain frightened his wife and shocked her, and she prevailed over him by an almost deliberate reliance upon that weakness to which he, the chivalrous Southerner—the born cavalier, in reality—could not fail to respond. Why did she habitually call him "Youth"? Was it not from an instinctive sense that her power lay in keeping him a child, in asserting the maternal attitude which he could never resist? He had indeed found a second mother now, and he "not only accepted her rule implicitly," as Mr. Howells says, "but he rejoiced, he gloried in it." He teased her, he occasionally enjoyed "shivering" her "exquisite sense of decorum"; but he, who could not trust his own judgment and to whom, consequently, one taboo was as reasonable as another, submitted to all her taboos as a matter of course. "I would quit wearing socks," he said, "if she thought them immoral."
It was, this marriage, as we perceive, a case of the blind leading the blind. Mark Twain had thrown himself into the hands of his wife; she, in turn, was merely the echo of her environment. "She was very sensitive about me," he wrote in his Autobiography. "It distressed her to see me do heedless things which could bring me under criticism." That was partly, of course, because she wished him to succeed for his own sake, but it was also because she was not sure of herself. We can see, between the lines of Mr. Paine's record, not only what a shy little provincial body she was, how easily thrown out of her element, how ill-at-ease in their journeyings about the world, but how far from unambitious she was also. It was for her own sake, therefore, that she trimmed him and tried to turn Caliban into a gentleman. Timid and ambitious as she was, having annexed him to herself she had to make him as presentable as possible in order to satisfy her own vanity before the eyes of those upon whose approval her happiness depended. Mark Twain told once of the torture of embarrassment with which she had had to confess at a London dinner-table that he, the great American author, had never read Balzac, Thackeray, "and the others." But Boston, from the point of view of Elmira, was almost as awe-inspiring as London. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens were often the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. Here is what Mark Twain wrote to Howells after one of these visits: "I 'caught it' for letting Mrs. Howells bother and bother about her coffee, when it was 'a good deal better than we get at home.' I 'caught it' for interrupting Mrs. C. at the last moment and losing her the opportunity to urge you not to forget to send her that MS. when the printers are done with it. I 'caught it' once more for personating that drunken Colonel James. I 'caught it' for mentioning that Mr. Longfellow's picture was slightly damaged; and when, after a lull in the storm, I confessed, shamefacedly, that I had privately suggested to you that we hadn't any frames, and that if you wouldn't mind hinting to Mr. Houghton, etc., etc., etc., the madam was simply speechless for the space of a minute. Then she said: 'How could you, Youth! The idea of sending Mr. Howells, with his sensitive nature,'" etc. She was on pins and needles, we see, and it must have been intolerable to her that, at the Atlantic dinners, her husband, in spite of his immense fame, sat below the salt: her whole innocent mood was that of a woman to whom the values of that good society which, as Goethe said, offers no material for poetry, are the supreme, unquestionable values and who felt that she and her brood must at all hazards learn the ropes. Mark Twain, after the enormous break of his Whittier Birthday speech, wrote to Mr. Howells: "My sense of disgrace does not abate. It grows. I see that it is going to add itself to my list of permanencies, a list of humiliations that extends back to when I was seven years old, and which keeps on persecuting me regardless of my repentances." Imagine a European man of genius having to qualify, not as an individual, but as a member of a social order into which he had not been born! Charles Dickens never felt grateful to society because it tolerated the man who had once been a waif of the streets: Mark Twain, as Mr. Paine presents him, was always the barefoot boy among the gods.
Only in the light of this general subjugation of Mark Twain's character can we understand his literary subjugation. From the moment of his marriage his artistic integrity, already compromised, had, as a matter of fact, been irreparably destroyed: quite literally, as a man of letters, his honor rooted in dishonor stood and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. He had accepted his father-in-law's financial assistance; he had bought his post on the Buffalo Express; in return, he had solemnly pledged the freedom of his mind. In these words of his Salutatory he made his pledge public: "Being a stranger it would be immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending patrons of this paper, who are about to be exposed to constant attacks of my wisdom and learning. But the word shall be as brief as possible. 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.... Such is my platform. I do not see any use in it, but custom is law and must be obeyed." Never, surely, was a creative will more innocently, more painlessly surrendered than in those words; marriage had been, for Mark Twain's artistic conscience, like the final whiff of chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already induced. With that promise to be "good," to refrain from hurting "parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity" of his journal, the artist in Mark Twain had fallen into a final trance: anybody could manipulate him now. We have seen that his wife, who had become his chief censor, having no more independence of judgment than he, simply exposed him to the control of public opinion. This, in all matters of culture, meant New England, and especially Boston, and accordingly to please Boston—impossible, terrifying task!—had become as obligatory upon Mark Twain as to please Elmira.
We have already observed the intellectual posture of Boston during the Gilded Age. Frigid and emasculate, it cast upon the presuming outsider the cold and hostile eye of an elderly maiden aunt who is not prepared to stand any nonsense. "To-morrow night," writes Mark Twain, in one of his earlier letters, "I appear for the first time before a Boston audience—4,000 critics"; he was lecturing with Petroleum V. Nasby, and he tells how frightened Petroleum was before the ordeal. Fortunately, in a sense, for Mark Twain, he had, in Mr. Howells, a charitable sponsor, a charitable intermediary; but unfortunately for his genius Mr. Howells was no more independent than himself: Mr. Howells was almost as much the nervous and timid alien in Boston society as Mrs. Clemens, and as the latter's natural ally and supreme authority in the task of shaping her husband, instead of dispelling Mark Twain's fears he simply redoubled them. Together, like two tremulous maids dressing the plebeian daughter of some newly-rich manufacturer in order to make her presentable for a court ball, they worked over him, expurgated him, trimmed him—to his own everlasting gratitude. To Mr. Howells he wrote: "I owe as much to your training as the rude country job-printer owes to the city-boss who takes him in hand and teaches him the right way to handle his art"; and of his wife he said: "I was a mighty rough, coarse, unpromising subject when Livy took charge of me ... and I may still be to the rest of the world, but not to her. She has made a very creditable job of me." And no doubt that refining process was necessary. If Mark Twain had been enabled to stand on his own feet, had been helped to discover himself as an artist, it would have resulted naturally from the growth of his own self-consciousness, his own critical sense. As it was, undertaken in behalf of a wholly false, external ideal and by people who had no comprehension of his true principle of growth, people who were themselves subservient to public opinion, it destroyed the last vestiges of his moral independence. There is a sorry tale about Mark Twain's neckties that is really symbolic of the process he was going through. It seems that long after his marriage he still continued to wear an old-fashioned Western string-tie which was a cause of great embarrassment to his family and his friends, an ever-present reminder that his regeneration was still incomplete. No one quite knew what to do about it till at last Howells and Aldrich boldly bought him two cravats and humored him, to his wife's infinite comfort, into wearing them. In this way the mysteries of a provincial gentility—provincial because it was without a sense of proportion—were kept constantly before his mind and he, the lovable victim of his own love, a Gulliver among the Lilliputians, a sleeping Samson, surrendered his limbs to the myriad threads of convention, yielded his locks to the shears of that simple Delilah his wife.
For what sort of taste was it that Mark Twain had to satisfy? Hardly a taste for the frank, the free, the animated, the expressive! The criticism he received was purely negative. We are told that Mrs. Clemens and her friends read Meredith "with reverential appreciation," that they formed a circle of "devout listeners" when Mark Twain himself used to read Browning aloud in Hartford. Profane art, the mature expression of life, in short, was outside Mrs. Clemens's circle of ideas; she could not breathe in that atmosphere with any comfort; her instinctive notion of literature was of something that is read at the fireside, out loud, under the lamp, a family institution, vaguely associated with the Bible and a father tempering the wind of King James's English to the sensitive ears and blushing cheek of the youngest daughter. Her taste, in a word, was quite infantile. "Mrs. Clemens says my version of the blindfold novelette, 'A Murder and a Marriage,' is 'good.' Pretty strong language for her," writes Mark Twain in 1876; and we know that when he was at work on "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Prince and the Pauper," she so greatly preferred the latter that Mark Twain really felt it was rather discreditable of him to pay any attention to "Huckleberry Finn" at all. "Imagine this fact," he wrote to Howells; "I have even fascinated Mrs. Clemens with this yarn for youth. My stuff generally gets considerable damning with faint praise out of her, but this time it is all the other way. She is become the horse-leech's daughter, and my mill doesn't grind fast enough to suit her. This is no mean triumph, my dear sir." And shortly afterward he wrote to his mother: "I have two stories, and by the verbal agreement they are both going into the same book; but Livy says they're not, and by George I she ought to know. She says they're going into separate books, and that one of them is going to be elegantly gotten up, even if the elegance of it eats up the publisher's profits and mine, too." It was "The Prince and the Pauper," a book that anybody might have written but whose romantic mediævalism was equally respectable in its tendency and infantile in its appeal, that Mrs. Clemens felt so proud of: "nobody," adds Mr. Paine, "appears to have been especially concerned about Huck, except, possibly the publisher." Plainly it was very little encouragement that Mark Twain's natural genius received from these relentless critics to whom he stood in such subjection, to whom he offered such devotion; for Mr. Howells, too, if we are to accept Mr. Paine's record, seconded him as often as not in these innocuous, infantile ventures, abetting him in the production of "blindfold novelettes" and plays of an abysmal foolishness. As for Mark Twain's unique masterpiece, "Huckleberry Finn," "I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got," he writes, "and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS. when it is done"; to which Mr. Paine adds: "It did not fascinate him as did the story of the wandering prince. He persevered only as the story moved him.... Apparently, he had not yet acquired confidence or pride enough in poor Huck to exhibit him, even to friends." And quite naturally! His artistic self-respect had been so little developed, had been, in fact, so baffled and abashed by all this mauling and fumbling that he could take no pride in a book which was, precisely, the mirror of the unregenerate past he was doing his best to live down.