The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

And then, most significant of all, there was his undeveloped æsthetic sense. "Mark Twain," says his biographer, "was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his art nor his tastes were of an 'artistic' kind." But such distinctions lose their meaning an inch below the surface. Every one is "artistic": Mark Twain, like the majority of people, was merely rudimentarily so. His humorous acknowledgment of this fact is, of course, well known; all the world remembers how he said that in Bayreuth he felt like "a heretic in heaven":—"Well," he adds, in "The Shrine of St. Wagner," "I ought to have recognized the sign—the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo." What did he like? In painting, Landseer—"and the way he makes animals absolute flesh and blood—insomuch that if the room were darkened ever so little and a motionless living animal placed beside a painted one, no man could tell which was which." In music, the Jubilee Singers: "Away back in the beginning—to my mind—their music made all other vocal music cheap; and that early notion is emphasized now.... It moves me infinitely more than any other music can. I think that in the jubilees and their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages." In poetry, Kipling—"I guess he's just about my level." In earlier years, we are told, an ancient favorite called "The Burial of Moses" became for him "a sort of literary touchstone," and this general order of taste remained his to the end. There was a moment when he read Browning, a rage that Mr. Paine finds unaccountable, though we can perhaps attribute it to the fun he had in puzzling it all out; he had a lifelong passion for Omar Khayyam, but that was half a matter of rhythm and half a matter of doctrine; he had a sanguinary encounter with Flaubert's "Salammbô," which he didn't like, "any of it": otherwise his chosen reading was wholly non-æsthetic. He "detested" novels, in particular: "I never could stand Meredith and most of the other celebrities," he said, inclusively. He called Warfield's "The Music Master" as "permanent" as Jefferson's "Rip Van Winkle," as, for that matter, it was: indeed, he seems to have taken a general passive pleasure in all the popular plays and stories of all the seasons. The positive note in his taste, then, was the delight in sonorous sound, with haunting suggestions of mossy marble and Thanatopsianism—in short, that sense of swinging rhythm which is the most primitive form of æsthetic emotion, combined with just those tints of sentiment, by turns mortuary and super-masculine, which are characteristic of an Anglo-Saxon adolescence.

Now all these traits of an arrested development correspond with the mental processes we find at work in Mark Twain's literary life. In his lack of pride, of sustained interest, in his work, of artistic self-determination and self-control, in his laziness and loose extravagance one finds all the signs of the impatient novice who becomes gradually the unwilling novice, without ever growing up to the art of letters at all. Finally, as we shall see, the books he wrote with love, the books in which he really expressed himself and achieved a measure of greatness, were books of, and chiefly for, children, books in which his own juvenility freely registered itself.

"Papa has done a great deal in his life that is good and very remarkable," wrote little Susy Clemens, when she was fourteen years old, "but I think if he had had the advantages with which he could have developed the gifts which he has made no use of in writing his books ... he could have done more than he has, and a great deal more, even."

I should like to point out that there is more discernment in the fragmentary notes of this little girl than in anything else that has been published about Mark Twain. Susy Clemens was a born psychologist; she was always troubled about her father; she seems indeed to have been the only one of his family, his associates, to conjecture in her dim, childish way that his spirit was at odds with itself, that a worm perhaps, for she could never have said what or why, lay at the root of that abounding temperament. When she set down this note her father was in the full glory of his mid-career; wealth and fame were rolling in upon him and tides of praise from all the world. He was on a pinnacle of happiness, indulging to the full that reckless prodigality, spiritual and material, in which he found his chief delight. Mr. Howells, Twitchell, those who watched over him, fell, like so many children themselves, into that mood of a spendthrift adolescence. Was his house always full of carpenters and decorators, adapting it to some wider scheme of splendid living? Was there no limit to that lavish hospitality? Was his life constantly broken by business activities, by trips to Canada, by the hundred and one demands that are laid upon an energetic man of affairs? Not one of his friends seems ever to have guessed that he was missing his destiny. Some years ago Mr. Howells reprinted the long series of his reviews of Mark Twain's books; admirable comments as they often are from a literary point of view, there is not the slightest indication in them of any sense of the story of a human soul. His little daughter alone seems to have divined that story, and she was troubled. Something told her what these full-grown men of letters and religion never guessed, that this extravagant playboy was squandering not his possessions but himself, scattering to the winds the resources nature had committed to him; and she alone knew perhaps that somehow, sometime, he would have to pay for it.

Indeed, for it is not yet the time to deal with consequences, was there ever anything like the loose prodigality of Mark Twain's mind? "His mental Niagara," says Mr. Paine, "was always pouring away." It was, and without any sort of discrimination, any sort of control. He tossed off as the small change of anecdote thousands of stories any dozen of which would have made the fortune of another popular writer: stories fell from his hand like cards strewn upon the ground. We have seen how innumerable were the side activities into which he poured the energy he was unable to use in his writing. In his writing alone his energy was super-abundant to such a degree that he never really knew what he was doing: his energy was the master, and he was merely the scribe.

Unused, half-used, misused—was ever anything like that energy? Mr. Paine tells of his "piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release." He was always throwing himself away upon some trifle, stumbling over himself, as it were, because the end he had actually focussed was so absurdly inadequate to the means he couldn't help lavishing upon it. There was "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story," for instance: it suggests an elephant trying to play with a pea. What is the story, after all, but a sort of gigantic burlesque on "Sherlock Holmes"? That is the obscure intention, unless I am mistaken; Mark Twain wants to show you how simple it is to turn these little tricks of the story-teller's trade. And what is the final result? A total defeat. "Sherlock Holmes" emerges from the contest as securely the victor as a living gnat perched upon the nose of a dead lion. And then there were those vast quantities of letters, twenty, thirty, forty pages long, which he is said to have written to Mr. Howells. "I am writing to you," he remarks, in one that has been published, "not because I have anything to say, but because you don't have to answer and I need something to do this afternoon." Mark Twain's letters are not good letters just because of this lack of economy. His mind does not play over things with that instinctive check and balance that makes good gossip: it merely opens the sluice and lets nature tumble through, in all its meaningless abundance. That was Mark Twain's way. Think of the plans he conceived and never carried out, even the fraction of them that we have record of, the "multitude of discarded manuscripts" Mr. Paine mentions now and then: three bulky manuscripts about Satan, a diary of Shem in Noah's ark, "3000 Years Among the Microbes," a burlesque manual of etiquette, a story about life in the interior of an iceberg, "Hell-Fire Hotchkiss," "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians," another book about Huck and Tom half written in 1897, a third book begun after his return to Missouri in 1902, a ghastly tale about an undertaker's love-affair which did not pass the family censor—"somehow he could never tell the difference," the story of a dubious miraculous conception in Arkansas, "The Autobiography of a Damn Fool," "The Mysterious Chamber," the "1002nd Arabian Night," in which Scheherezade was finally to talk the Sultan to death—how many others were there? It was always hit-or-miss with Mark Twain. That large, loose, ignorant way he had of talking in later years, so meticulous in his statistics, so exceedingly fallible in his social intuitions—how like so many other elderly Americans of our day who have lived lives of authority!—was it not characteristic of his whole career? That vast flow, that vast fog of promiscuous talk—was it garrulous, was it not rather phosphorescent, swarming with glinting fragments of an undeveloped genius, like space itself, with all the stars of space, following some dim orbit perhaps, but beyond the certain consciousness, outside the feeblest control, of any mortal mind?

An undeveloped genius, an undeveloped artistic faculty—could there be a surer sign of it than this lack of inner control? What we observe in all this prodigal and chaotic display of energy is the natural phenomenon who has not acquired the characteristics of the artist at all, those two supreme characteristics, especially, upon which Rodin so insisted in his writings patience and conscience, characteristics which Puritanism has monopolized for the moral life, but which are of the essence of all art.

Patience, conscience, economy, self-knowledge, all those humble traits of the wise and sober workingman which every mature artist is—where shall we look for them in Mark Twain's record? "I don't know that I can write a play that will play," he says, in a letter from Vienna in 1898; "but no matter, I'll write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I didn't know there was such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't play." This fumbling, frantic child of sixty-three has forgotten that years before he had been convinced, and with every reason, that write a play he could not. And hear him again: "I have begun twenty magazine articles and books—and flung every one of them aside in turn." Is this a young apprentice, impatiently trying out the different aspects of a talent about which he is still in the dark? No, it is a veteran of letters, who has been writing books for thirty years and who, far from attempting new and difficult experiments in his craft, lacks nothing but the perseverance to carry out some trivial undertaking on an old and well-tried pattern. It is true that on this occasion his debts had interfered and taken the spirit out of his work; nevertheless, those months in Vienna whose tale he tells were almost typical of his life. He appears habitually to have had five or six books going at once which he found it almost impossible to finish; there were always swarms of beginnings, but his impulse seldom carried him through. This was true even of the writing of those books in which, as one might suppose, he was most happily expressing himself. He groaned over "Life on the Mississippi" and only drove himself on in order to fulfill an absurd contract that Mark Twain the writer had made with Mark Twain the publisher. And, strangest of all, as it would seem if we did not know how little his wife approved of the book, there was "Huckleberry Finn." This man who had experienced a "consuming interest and delight" in the composition of a play which Mr. Paine calls "a dreary, absurd, impossible performance"—no doubt because he had been able to write the whole of it, three hundred pages, in forty-two hours by the clock, only by a sort of chance, it appears, finished his one masterpiece at all. He wrote it fitfully, during a period of eight years, his interest waxing and waning but never holding out, till at last he succeeded in pushing it into the home stretch. Indeed, he seems to have been all but incapable of absorption. The most engrossing idea he ever had was probably that of the "Connecticut Yankee," a book at least more ambitious than any other he attempted. But even the demoniac possession of that, for it was demoniac, suffered a swift interruption. Hardly was he immersed in it when he rushed out again in a sudden sally. It was in defense of General Grant's English style, and the red rag this time was the grammatical peccability of Matthew Arnold.

In all this capricious, distracted, uncertain, spasmodic effort we observe the desperate amateur, driven back again and again by a sudden desire, by necessity, by a hundred impulsions to a task which he cannot master, which fascinates him and yet, to speak paradoxically, fails to interest him. Nothing is more significant than this total lack of sustained interest in his work—his lack of interest in literature itself, for that matter. In all his books, in all the endless pages of his life and letters, there is scarcely a hint of any concern with the technique, or indeed with any other aspect, of what was nothing else, surely, than his art. I have just noted the general character of his æsthetic taste: he was well satisfied with it, he was undisturbed by æsthetic curiosity. He said he "detested" novels; in general, he seems to have read none but those of Mr. Howells, his father confessor in literature. He told more than once how, at a London dinner-table, Mrs. Clemens had been "tortured" to have to admit to Stepniak that he had never read Balzac, Thackeray "and the others"; he said that his brother had tried to get him to read Dickens and that, although he was ashamed, he could not do it: he had read only, and that several times, "A Tale of Two Cities," because, we may assume, its theme is the French Revolution, in which he had an abiding interest. An animal repugnance to Jane Austen, an irritated schoolboy's dislike of Scott and Cooper—is not that the measure of the literary criticism he has left us? But here again there was a positive note—his lifelong preoccupation with grammar. How many essays and speeches, introductions and extravaganzas by Mark Twain turn upon some question whose interest is purely or mainly verbal!—"English as She Is Taught," "A Simplified Alphabet," "The Awful German Language," "A Majestic Literary Fossil," "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," "Italian with Grammar," "William Dean Howells," "General Grant and Matthew Arnold," "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." It is the letter-perfection of Mr. Howells that dazzles him; the want of it he considers a sufficient reason for saying "you're another" to Matthew Arnold and tripping him up over some imaginary verbal gaucherie. He is indignant with Cooper for calling women "females": indignation was Mark Twain's habitual attitude toward the modes of the past; and foreign languages never ceased to be infinitely ludicrous to him just because they weren't English. These are all signs of the young schoolboy who has begun to take a pride in his first compositions and who has become suddenly aware of words; and I suggest that Mark Twain never reached the point of being more at home in the language of civilization than that. His preoccupation with letter-perfection is thrown into a significant light by the style of "Huckleberry Finn." If the beauty and the greatness of that book spring from the joyous freedom of the author, is it not because, in throwing off the bonds of the bourgeois society whose mold he had been obliged to take, he was reverting not only to a frame of mind he had essentially never outgrown, but to a native idiom as well?

Mark Twain has told us again and again that in all vital matters a man is the product of his training. If we wanted further proof that his taste was simply rudimentary we might observe that it developed in some slight measure, though very slightly and inconclusively, the "training" having come too late. Mr. Paine tells us, for example, that twelve years after the pilgrimage of "The Innocents Abroad," he found the new, bright copies of the old masters no longer an improvement on the originals, although he still did not care for the originals. Indeed, if we wish to understand the reason for the barbarous contempt he displays, obtrusively in his earlier work, for the historic memorials of the human spirit in Europe, we have only to turn to the postscript of "The Innocents Abroad" itself. "We were at home in Palestine," says Mark Twain. "It was easy to see that that was the grand feature of the expedition. We had cared nothing much about Europe. We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican—all the galleries.... We examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn't we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We fell into raptures by the barren shores of Galilee; we pondered at Tabor and at Nazareth.... Yes, the pilgrimage part of the excursion was its pet feature—there is no question about that." Why? Why were Paris and Rome nothing to Mark Twain but the material for an indifferent, a hostile persiflage, while Jerusalem was "full of poetry, sublimity, and, more than all, dignity"? It was because the only education he had known was that "Hebraic" education which led Matthew Arnold to say that the American people of his time were simply the English middle class transplanted. "To 'fear God and dread the Sunday School,'" he wrote to Mr. Howells once, "exactly described that old feeling which I used to have." But had he ever outgrown this fear and dread? Had not his wife and all those other narrow, puritanical influences to which he had subjected himself simply taken the place of the Sunday School in his mind? "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which he wrote quite late in life, is an old-fashioned Western country "Sunday School scholar's" romantic dream of the "land of Egypt"—Tom Sawyer's "abroad" doesn't include Europe at all; and we have seen that Mark Twain's general attitude as a European tourist remained always that of the uninitiated American business man. His attention had been fixed in his childhood upon the civilization of the Biblical lands, and that is why they seemed to him so full of poetry and dignity; his attention had never been fixed upon the civilization of Europe, and that is why it seemed to him so empty and absurd. Faced with these cultural phenomena, he reverted all his life to the attitude which had been established in him in his boyhood and had been confirmed by all the forces that had arrested his development beyond that stage.