How completely, in a word, Mark Twain had adopted the prevailing point of view of the industrial epoch! How completely, in him, during those middle years, the poet was submerged in the pioneer! Much as he praised men of letters like Howells, his real admiration and respect went out to the "strong, silent men" of money like H.H. Rogers. One recalls the hesitation with which he, "the Lincoln of our literature," as Mr. Howells calls him, presumed to offer compliments to General Grant on the literary quality of his Memoirs: "I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating." There is decidedly more than a personal humility in that, there is all the pioneer's contempt for the word as against the deed, an ingrained contempt for the creative life as against the life of sagacious action. And this was deeply characteristic of Mark Twain. He was always for the Bacons as opposed to the Shakespeares; in his private memoranda he does not conceal a certain disdain for Jesus Christ in comparison with Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, and the indignant passion of his defense of Harriet Shelley, to mention an allied instance, is hardly qualified by any regard for her husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion—At 12:20 this afternoon a line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was done automatically—instantly—perfectly. This is indeed the first line of movable types that ever was perfectly spaced and perfectly justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well—dizzy, stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Mark Twain was fifty-four years old at this time and those memories were very far away, too far away—as even his financial interest was too shallow, after all—to account for this emotion, before one of the innumerable mechanical miracles of the nineteenth century, of respect, of reverence, of awe-struck wonder. How far, we ask ourselves, how far had not Mark Twain become, in order to experience that emotion in the presence of a piece of machinery, something no longer himself but the embodiment of the whole industrial epoch? It is enough to note how capable he was of the elevations of religion, and what it was that caused those elevations in him. It was not literature. Paige, the inventor of this machine, he called "a poet, a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel": which leaves little to be said about the poets who write in mere words. And, in fact, on the occasion of Walt Whitman's seventieth birthday, Mark Twain expressed, in a way, his opinion of such people. He congratulated the poet for having lived in an age that had witnessed, among other benefactions, "the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal-tar"; he neglected to congratulate the age for having produced Walt Whitman.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE PLAYBOY IN LETTERS
"How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?"JOHN STUART MILL.
We have now watched the gradual building up and the final flowering in Mark Twain of the personality which his mother, his wife, all America indeed, had, so to speak, wished upon him. It came into existence, we recall, that personality, through his mother's ruthless opposition to the poet in him, through the shock of his father's death; and every influence he had encountered in life had confirmed him in the pursuit of opulent respectability. We have seen, however, that this was not the real Mark Twain, this money-making, success-loving, wire-pulling Philistine; it was a sort of dissociated self, the race-character, which had risen in him with the stoppage of his true individuality. The real Mark Twain had been arrested in his development, the artist had remained rudimentary; and this is the Mark Twain we have to consider now. "What a child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" It was this childishness which caused and which explains his lack of spiritual independence as a man and which accounts for the character of his work as a writer.
"What a child he was!" Glance, in the first place, at that famous temperament of his. Perhaps the best impression we have of it is one written by his friend Joseph Twitchell in a letter from Switzerland where they were tramping together in 1878. Mark Twain was forty-three at the time. "Mark is a queer fellow," says Twitchell. "There is nothing that he so delights in as a swift, strong stream. You can hardly get him to leave one when once he is within the influence of its fascinations. To throw in stones and sticks seems to afford him rapture. To-night, as we were on our way back to the hotel, seeing a lot of driftwood by the torrent side below the path, I climbed down and threw it in. When I got back to the path Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstacy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn't been so excited in three months. He acted just like a boy." And observe what he said of himself in "The Turning-Point of My Life": "By temperament I was the kind of person that does things. Does them and reflects afterward. So I started for the Amazon without reflecting and without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me: I still do the thing commanded by Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward." One could hardly ask for a more perfect definition of immaturity.
Then there was his boyish passion for make-believe, his inclination for gorgeous trappings and medieval splendor, what Mr. Paine calls "the fullness of his love for theatrical effect." We know how he enjoyed dressing up for the children's charades, how he revelled in the costumes of "The Prince and the Pauper." His lifelong delight in showing off had the same origin. Mr. Paine tells how in Washington once, when they were staying at the Willard Hotel, supposing that Clemens would like to go down to dinner with as little ostentation as possible he took him by an elevator that entered the dining-room directly and without stopping at the long corridor known as Peacock Alley. When they reached the dining-room, however, Clemens inquired, "Isn't there another entrance to this place?" and hearing that there was, a very conspicuous one, he added, "Let's go back and try it over." "So," says Mr. Paine, "we went back up the elevator, walked to the other end of the hotel, and came down to the F Street entrance. There is a fine stately flight of steps-a really royal stair—leading from this entrance down into Peacock Alley. To slowly descend that flight is an impressive thing to do. It is like descending the steps of a throne-room, or to some royal landing-place where Cleopatra's barge might lie. I confess that I was somewhat nervous at the awfulness of the occasion, but I reflected that I was powerfully protected; so side by side, both in full-dress, white ties, white silk waistcoats, and all, we came down that regal flight. Of course he was seized upon at once by a lot of feminine admirers, and the passage along the corridor was a perpetual gantlet. I realize now that this gave the dramatic finish to his day, and furnished him with proper appetite for his dinner." All the actors in the world may protest that they would do the same thing: the motive is none the less for that an adolescent one. When Mark Twain marvelled at the court costumes of the Indian princes at Oxford, when he said he had been particularly anxious to see the Oxford pageant in order to get ideas for his funeral procession, which he was "planning on a large scale," when he remarked, "If I had been an ancient Briton, I would not have contented myself with blue paint, but I would have bankrupted the rainbow," was he not, at sixty, at seventy, just, or rather still, Tom Sawyer?
Then there was his sense of proportion, or rather his lack of any sense of proportion, his rudimentary judgment. I shall say nothing here of his truly dazzling display of this in matters of business. But did not Mark Twain, who was supposed to understand his own countrymen, foretell that within a generation after his death America would be a monarchy, a literal monarchy, not merely a citadel of economic reaction? Did he not affirm with all conviction that the Christian Scientists would so increase and multiply that in forty years they would dominate our political life? There are certainly at this time Western cities where that has occurred, but Mark Twain, the hardy prophet, seems never to have glimpsed the nascent forces into whose control the political and economic future seems really bound to pass. In all the years of his traveling to and fro through Europe he divined hardly one of the social tendencies that had so spectacular a dénouement within four years of his death. In Austria, where he spent so much time at the turning of the century, he was dazzled by the pomp of the assassinated empress's funeral—"this murder," he writes, with the fatuity of a school boy, "will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from now"; but what did he make of that memorable clash he witnessed in the Reichsrath between the Czech and the German deputies? All history was involved in that, as any one can see now, as a discerning man might almost have seen then. In Mark Twain's "Stirring Times in Austria" it is scarcely anything but a meaningless brawl. He does not make comic copy of it, he reports it with all gravity, but he understands nothing of it—indeed he freely says so. It was this same childish incuriosity regarding the nature and causes of the human drama, this same rudimentary cultural sense, that led him always instinctively to think of history, for instance, just as boys of ten used to think of it, as a succession of kings, that led him into that reckless use of superlatives wherever his interest happened to be engaged. He assured Mr. Paine that the news of somebody's "discovery" of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays would reach him by cable wherever he was, that "the world would quake with it"; and he said, without any qualification whatever, that the premature end of the Russian-Japanese war was "entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history."
And quite on a par with his reckless juvenility of judgment was Mark Twain's level of reflection. The jottings from his note-books that Mr. Paine has published consist mainly of mere childlike observations of sheer fact or expressions of personal animus. His remarks on social, political and economic subjects are precisely of the sort one would expect from what is called the average man: "Communism is idiocy," for example. "They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it. It requires brains to keep money as well as to make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good." Is that the sort of exploded platitude one looks for from a famous man of letters? Imagine a French or an English writer of rank, even of the most conservative color, committing to paper an opinion so utterly unphilosophical! One would say that Mark Twain had never thought at all.