Behold Mrs. Clemens, then, in the rôle of critic and censor. A memorandum Mark Twain made at the time when he and she were going over the proofs of "Following the Equator" shows us how she conceived of her task. It is in the form of a dialogue between them:
Page 1,020, 9th line from the top. I think some other word would be better than "stench." You have used that pretty often.
But can't I get it in anywhere? You've knocked it out every time. Out it goes again. And yet "stench" is a noble, good word.
Page 1,038. I hate to have your father pictured as lashing a slave boy.
It's out, and my father is whitewashed.
Page 1,050, 2nd line from the bottom. Change "breech-clout." It's a word that you love and I abominate. I would take that and "offal" out of the language.
You are steadily weakening the English tongue, Livy.
We can see from this that to Mrs. Clemens virility was just as offensive as profanity, that she had no sense of the difference between virility and profanity and vulgarity, that she had, in short, no positive taste, no independence of judgment at all. We can see also that she had no artistic ideal for her husband, that she regarded his natural liking for bold and masculine language, which was one of the outward signs of his latent greatness, merely as a literary equivalent of bad manners, as something that endangered their common prestige in the eyes of conventional public opinion. She condemned his writings, says Mr. Paine, specifically, "for the offense they might give in one way or another"; and that her sole object, however unconscious, in doing this was to further him, not as an artist but as a popular success, and especially as a candidate for gentility, is proved by the fact that she made him, as we observe in the incident of his father and the slave boy, whitewash not only himself but his family history also. And in all this Mr. Howells seconded her. "It skirts a certain kind of fun which you can't afford to indulge in," he reminds our shorn Samson in one of his letters; and again, "I'd have that swearing out in an instant," the "swearing" in this case being what he himself admits is "so exactly the thing Huck would say"—namely, "they comb me all to hell." As for Mark Twain himself, he took it as meekly as a lamb. Mr. Paine tells of a certain story he had written that was disrespectful to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Forbidden to print it, he had "laboriously translated it into German, with some idea of publishing it surreptitiously; but his conscience had been too much for him. He had confessed, and even the German version had been suppressed." And how does he accept Mr. Howells's injunction about the "swearing" in "Huckleberry Finn"? "Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning," he writes, "and the next minute she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on her tongue, 'Where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of?' Then I had to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the MS. to her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like that, when you go a little one-sided?"
They are very humiliating, these glimpses of great American writers behind the scenes, given "rats" by their wives whenever they stray for an instant from the strait and narrow path that leads to success. "Once," writes Mr. Paine, "when Sarah Orne Jewett was with the party—in Rome—he remarked that if the old masters had labeled their fruit one wouldn't be so likely to mistake pears for turnips. 'Youth,' said Mrs. Clemens, gravely, 'if you do not care for these masterpieces yourself, you might at least consider the feelings of others'; and Miss Jewett, regarding him severely, added, in her quaint Yankee fashion: 'Now you've been spoke to!'" Very humiliating, very ignominious, I say, are these tableaux of "the Lincoln of our literature" in the posture of an ignorant little boy browbeaten by the dry sisters of Culture-Philistia. Very humiliating, and also very tragic!
Mark Twain had come East with the only conscious ambition that Western life had bred in him, the ambition to succeed in a practical sense, to win wealth and fame. But the poet in him was still astir, still seeking, seeking, seeking for corroboration, for the frank hand and the gallant word that might set it free. We know this from the dim hope of liberation he had associated with the idea of marriage, and we can guess that his eager desire to meet "men of superior intellect and character" was more than half a desire to find some one who could give him that grand conception of the literary life which he had never been able to formulate, some one who could show him how to meet life in the proud, free way of the artist, how to unify himself and focus his powers. Well, he had met the best, the greatest, he had met the man whom the Brahmins themselves had crowned as their successor, he had met Mr. Howells. And in this man of marvelous talent, this darling of all the gods and all the graces, he had encountered once more the eternal, universal, instinctive American subservience to what Mr. Santayana calls "the genteel tradition." He had reached, in short, the heaven of literature and found it empty, and there was nothing beyond for the poet in him to seek.
Consider, if I seem to be exaggerating, the story of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough in itself, but he was always tinkering with it: as the years went on it assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he wished to do and was prohibited from doing. "The other evening," his little daughter Susy records in 1886, "as papa and I were promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything; he said that he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book that he had been particularly anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published." He had begun it in 1868, even before he had issued "The Innocents Abroad," the vast popular success of which had overlaid this tentative personal venture that he had been prevented, because of its "blasphemous" tendency, from pursuing. There was his true line, the line of satire—we know it as much from the persistence with which he clung to that book as from his own statement that it was the only one he had been particularly anxious to write; there was his true line, and he had halted in it for want of corroboration. And what was Mr. Howells's counsel? "When Howells was here last," writes Mark Twain to his brother Orion in 1878, "I laid before him the whole story without referring to the MS. and he said: 'You have got it sure this time. But drop the idea of making mere magazine stuff of it. Don't waste it. Print it by itself—publish it first in England—ask Dean Stanley to endorse it, which will draw some of the teeth of the religious press, and then reprint in America." There was the highest ideal, the boldest conception, of personal freedom, of the independence of the spirit, of the function of literature that Mark Twain had found in America. "Neither Howells nor I," he adds, "believe in hell or the divinity of the Savior, but no matter." No matter, no! The integrity of the spirit had become as indifferent to him as it was to the Gilded Age itself. He, this divided soul, had sought the great leader and had found only an irresponsible child like himself, a child who told him that you had to sneak off behind the barn if you wanted to smoke the pipe of truth.
Is it remarkable, then, that having found in the literary life as it shaped itself in industrial America every incentive to cower and cringe and hedge, and no incentive whatever to stand upright as a man—is it remarkable, I say, that Mark Twain should have relapsed into the easy, happy posture that came so natural to him in the presence of his wife, the posture of the little boy who is licensed to play the literary game as much as he likes so long as he isn't too rude or too vulgar and turns an honest penny by it and never forgets that the real business of life is to make hay in fame and fortune and pass muster, in course of time, as a gentleman? "Smoke?" he writes. "I always smoke from three till five on Sunday afternoons, and in New York, the other day, I smoked a week day and night.... And once or twice I smouched a Sunday when the boss wasn't looking. Nothing is half so good as literature hooked on Sunday, on the sly." Incorrigible naughty boy! He never dreams of asserting a will of his own; but doesn't he delight in his freedom from responsibility, isn't it a relief to be absolved from the effort of creating standards of his own and living up to them?
"A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him," wrote Mark Twain, years later. "It is his human environment which influences his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that road he will find himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval he most values." He who so willingly suppressed, at his wife's command, the first germ of the book he was to call his "Bible," a deistical note on God, who had formed the habit of withholding views which he thought would strike his neighbors as "shocking, heretical and blasphemous," who, in spite of his true opinions, spoke of himself in public to the end of his life as a Presbyterian, who had, in fact, like the chameleon which he said man was, taken the religious color of his environment, just as he had taken its social and financial color—had he not virtually ceased to feel any obligation to his own soul?
"If," he wrote, in "What is Man?", "if that timid man had lived all his life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had never heard speak of them, had never heard any one praise them nor express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more idea of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any possibility have occurred to him to resolve to become brave. He could not originate the idea—it had to come to him from the outside."
The tell-tale emphasis of those italics! Is not that drab philosophy of Mark Twain's, that cumbrous chain of argument, just one long pathetic plea in self-extenuation?