[CHAPTER VI]

EVERYBODY'S NEIGHBOR


"Friends are an expensive luxury; and when a man's whole capital is invested in a calling and a mission in life, he cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing. This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ."

IBSEN: Letter to Brandes,1870.

And now, behold the burgeoning, the efflorescence of the Mark Twain that all America knew! Forgotten, deeply buried, is the "queer, fanciful, uncommunicative child" of earlier days, forgotten is the grave and passionate young poet of the Mississippi, the pilot, even the miner who used to go off by himself and brood among those vague thoughts of his. Forgotten is the young poet and still unborn is the cynical philosopher of the years to come. Now, and for at least one glowing decade, Mark Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian interests and affections and appetites so complete an escape from the labors and the struggles of the creative spirit? Meanwhile, as his individuality sinks back, the race-character emerges; he reverts to type, and everything characteristic of his pioneer heritage, his pioneer environment, comes to the surface in him. It is like a sudden flowering in his nature of all the desires of those to whom his own desire has, from the outset of his life, subjected itself!

Mr. Herbert Croly, in his life of Mark Hanna, has described that worthy as the typical pioneer business man. "Personalities and associations," he says, "composed the substance" of Mark Hanna's life; "his disposition was active, sympathetic, and expansive; and it was both uncritical and uncalculating. He accepted from his surroundings the prevailing ideas and modes of action"; he had "an instinctive disposition towards an expansive, all-round life." Such was the character of "Boss Hanna"; trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the husband, the father, and the business man with responsibilities, the purpose of whose writing was to please his friends, make money, and entertain his own household. That vast, unemployed artistic energy of his, however, which had not found its proper channel, overflowed this narrow mold. Mark Twain was like a stream dammed in mid-career; and so powerful was that unconscious current which had been checked that instead of turning into a useful mill-pond he became a flood.

We have seen that his home had always been the hub of Mark Twain's universe. "Upset and disturbed" as he often was, says Mr. Paine, "he seldom permitted his distractions to interfere with the program of his fireside." It was there, indeed, that all the latent poetry of his nature, the poetry that so seldom got into his books, found its vent. "To us," he wrote once, "our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome—and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one great piety. "From the very beginning," says Mr. Paine, "Mark Twain's home meant always more to him than his work": indeed, in the name of his domestic ties, he had as completely surrendered his individuality as any monk in the name of religion. Naturally his home was important to him; it had become the spring of all his motives and all his desires. And having accepted the rôle of the opulent householder, he threw into it as much energy as two ordinary men are able to throw into their life-work.

Mark Twain had accepted his father-in-law's challenge: he was not going to fall behind the pace set by a coal-merchant whose household expenses were $40,000 a year. No one ever delighted more than he now in living up to those principles of "the conspicuous consumption of goods," "predatory emulation" and "the pecuniary canons of taste" which, according to Mr. Veblen, actuate the propertied class. "A failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension," says Mr. Veblen, "to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed to those who fall short in this respect." Of course Mark Twain couldn't stand that! As early as 1875 he writes to Mr. Howells: "You see I take a vile, mercenary view of things—but then my household expenses are something almost ghastly": he estimated that in the year 1881 he had spent considerably more than $100,000. "It was with the increased scale of living," says Mr. Paine, "that Clemens had become especially eager for some source of commercial profit; something that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his "disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, "he gloried in the splendor of his entertainment, the admiration and delight of his guests. There were always guests; they were coming and going constantly. Clemens used to say that he proposed to establish a 'bus line between their house and the station for the accommodation of his company.... For the better portion of the year he was willing to pay the price of it, whether in money or in endurance"—after a while he virtually gave up all thought of writing except during the summer months: "I cannot write a book at home," he frankly told his mother—"and Mrs. Clemens heroically did her part. She loved these things also, in her own way. She took pride in them, and realized that they were a part of his vast success. Yet in her heart she often longed for the simpler life—above all, for the farm life at Elmira. Her spirit cried out for the rest and comfort there." Could anything be more ironical? It was to satisfy her that he had repressed in himself the child of light in order to become the child of this world, and now she found herself actually drowning in the flood of that deflected energy!

To shine, meanwhile, to make money, to rival and outrival those whom the public most admired had become Mark Twain's ruling passion. With the beginning of his life in Buffalo he was already "a man of large consequence and events," and I have suggested that in the process of adapting himself all the latent instincts of his heritage had risen up in him. Take, for instance, that mechanical ingenuity which is one of the outstanding traits of the pioneer mind: it would certainly have remained in abeyance if Mark Twain had followed his natural tendency and become absorbed in literature. Now, however, with his ever-increasing need of money, it came to the fore and was by way of turning him into a professional inventor. At any rate, he invented, among other things, a waistcoat enabling the wearer to dispense with suspenders, a shirt requiring no studs, a perpetual calendar watch-charm, a method of casting brass dies for stamping book-covers and wall-paper and a postal-check to supplant the money-order in common use—not to mention the "Mark Twain Scrap-Book" which he did not hesitate, so confused were his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work—his impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"—that he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money in the following patents: a steam generator, a steam pulley, a new method of marine telegraphy, a new engraving process, a new cash-register, a spiral hatpin. His losses in almost every one of these enterprises amounted to between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars, and this is not to mention the Paige Typesetting Machine, which cost him nearly two hundred thousand dollars and whole years out of his life. He complained of the anxiety these ventures caused him, of the frantic efforts he had to make in order to collect the money to invest in them. But he had no choice now. He had to make money to keep the mill going at home and he had to make money in order to make money; besides, he was the victim of his own past, of the gambling habits of the gold-fields. Within one month after the happy conclusion of those agonizing years of struggle to redress his bankruptcy, he was negotiating with an Austrian inventor for a machine that was to be used to control the carpet-weaving industries of the world, planning a company to be capitalized at fifteen hundred million dollars.

Can we not see what an immense creative force must have been displaced in order to give passage to this "desire," as Mr. Paine calls it, "to heap up vast and sudden sums, to revel in torrential golden showers"? Mark Twain "boiled over," we are told, with projects for the distribution of General Grant's book: "his thoughts were far too busy with plans for furthering the sale of the great military memoir to follow literary ventures of his own." He had taken over the book because, as "the most conspicuous publisher in the world"—for this he had, in fact, become—he had an immense plant going, yawning, one might say, for the biggest available mouthful. His profit from this particular enterprise was $150,000; "Huckleberry Finn" brought him, at about the same time, $50,000 more: "I am frightened," he wrote, "at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold." His blood was up now, however; he was insatiable; how could he who, as a miner, had known what it was to be a "millionaire for ten days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of authors—he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, "reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada? What if he is in a state of chronic agitation and irritation, "excited, worried, impatient, rash, frenzied, and altogether upset"? He is living against the grain; no matter, he is living the true American life, living it with a mad fervor. He cannot even publish a book in the ordinary way, he has to make a fortune out of every one: "a book in the trade," he says, "is a book thrown away, as far as money-profit goes.... Any other means of bringing out a book [than subscription] is privately printing it." He "liked the game of business," Mr. Paine says, "especially when it was pretentious and showily prosperous." Yes, there Tom Sawyer might swagger to his heart's content and have all the multitude, and the enemies of his own household, with him. "Here I am," he exclaims, in the vision of the fortune that "poet in steel," Paige, is going to bring him—"here I am one of the wealthiest grandees in America, one of the Vanderbilt gang, in fact." Could Elmira have asked more of him than that?