How, then, are we to describe Mark Twain's literary character? Mr. Paine speaks of his genius as "given rather to elaboration than to construction"; he says that "most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he refers to "two of his chief gifts—transcription and portrayal," adding that "he was always greater at these things than at invention." Are not these traits, which are indisputable, the traits of a mind that has never attained to creation in the proper sense, a mind that has stopped short of the actual process of art? As we run over the list of his books we see that the majority of them, including virtually all his good work, were not even creative in design but rather reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or historical: "The Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," "Following the Equator," "Joan of Arc," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi." It was as a pilot on the river, he said, that he had learned to know human nature and the world. But had he assimilated what he learned? When, in later days, he turned back upon his life for literary material, it was not this great period that rose in his mind, save for the merely descriptive work of "Life on the Mississippi"—and even there it is the river itself and not its human nature that comes most insistently before us; it was his boyhood in Hannibal. Mark Twain remembered, indeed, the marvelous gallery of American types the Mississippi had spread before him, but it had never become his for art: his imagination had never attained the mastery over that variegated world of men. That his spirit had, in fact, been closed to experience is indicated in Mr. Paine's statement that "most of his characters reflected intimate personalities of his early life"; he has sketched a few portraits in outline, a few caricatures, but the only characters he is able to conceive realistically are boys. In "The Gilded Age" alone, in the sole character of Laura Hawkins, one can fairly say, he handles the material of real life with the novelist's intention, and what a character, what a love-story, hers is! "It is a long story: unfortunately, it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt upon," he says of Laura's seduction, with a prudent eye for the refined sensibilities of those ladies of Hartford under whose surveillance the book was written. It was a fortunate thing that Mark Twain did not attempt to dwell upon it: he would have had his task showing in detail how the fair and virginal Laura became the "consummate artist in passion" he says she did! He turns Laura into a Jezebel because, it is perfectly plain, the moral prepossessions of Hartford having been transgressed in her person, it was the popular melodramatic thing to do. He was both afraid and unable to present her character truly, and, in consequence, too impatient, too indifferent, too little interested, even to attempt it. We have here the conclusive, the typical, illustration of his failure as a creative artist. His original submission to the taboos of his environment had prevented him from assimilating life: consequently, he was prevented as much by his own immaturity as by fear of public opinion from ever attempting seriously to recreate it in his imagination.
We can best describe Mark Twain, therefore, as an improvisator, a spirit with none of the inner control, none of the self-determination of the artist, who composed extempore, as it were, and at the solicitation of influences external to himself. It is remarkable how many of his ideas are developments of "news items" floating about in his journalist's imagination, items like the Siamese Twins and the Tichborne case. Except for the ever-recurring themes of Huck and Tom, one would say that his own spirit never prompted his imagination at all; certainly his own spirit never controlled it. His books are without form and without development; they tell themselves, their author never holds the reins—a fact he naïvely confesses in the preface of "Those Extraordinary Twins": "Before the book was half finished those three were taking things almost entirely into their own hands and working the whole tale as a private venture of their own." Moreover, he depended upon outside stimulus, not to quicken his mental machinery merely, but actually to set it going. When, in later life, he wrote that man is "moved, directed, commanded by exterior influences solely," he was simply describing his personal experience.
Glance at his record once more. What led him to undertake the voyage that resulted in "The Innocents Abroad"? Chiefly the advice of Anson Burlingame. After publishing "The Innocents Abroad," we are told, "he had begun early in the year to talk about another book, but nothing had come of it beyond a project or two, more or less hazy and unpursued." It was only when his publisher came forward and suggested that he should write a book about his travels and experiences in the Far West that he set to work at the composition of "Roughing It." The presence and stimulus of his friend Twitchell enabled him to write "A Tramp Abroad": we know this from the fact that he undertook a subsequent journey down the Rhone with the express purpose of writing another book which, because, as he repeatedly said, Twitchell was not with him, resulted in nothing but "a state of coma" and a thousand chaotic notes he never used. In 1874 we find him again waiting for the impulse that seems hardly ever to have come from within: his wife and Howells urge him to write for the Atlantic and it is only then that fresh memories rise in his mind and he begins "Life on the Mississippi." In 1878, the demand for a new Mark Twain book of travel was "an added reason for going to Europe again." The chief motive that roused him to the composition of "A Connecticut Yankee" seems to have been to provide an adequate mouthful for the yawning jaws of his own publishing business. And even "Huckleberry Finn," if we are to believe Mr. Paine, was not spontaneously born: "He had received from somewhere new afflatus for the story of Huck and Tom, and was working on it steadily." This absence in him of the proud, instinctive autonomy of the artist is illustrated in another trait also. How overjoyed he was when he could get Mr. Howells to read his proofs for him, the proofs even of the books he had written for love! And how willing he was to have those proofs mauled and slashed! "His proof-sheets came back to The Atlantic," says Mr. Howells, "each a veritable 'mush of concession,' as Emerson says": and before he had finished "Life on the Mississippi" he set his publisher to work editing it, with the consequence, he writes, that "large areas of it are condemned here and there and yonder."
Here, I think, we approach the secret of Mark Twain's notorious "laziness." Mr. Paine assures us that he was not lazy in the ordinary sense of the word: "that he detested manual labor is true enough, but at the work for which he was fitted and intended it may be set down here on authority (and despite his own frequent assertions to the contrary) that to his last year he was the most industrious of men." Very well, but what are we to say of that "languor" of his, that love of "the loose luxury of undress and the comfort of pillows" which grew upon him, especially in later years, when he received his company propped up in bed in that gorgeous Persian dressing-gown, that "state of coma and lazy comfort and solid happiness" into which he was always drifting, that indolence which, aside from his incessant billiard-playing, led him to spend "most" of a summer in mid-life playing ten-pins? Much of it, no doubt, was a pose: it was a way of protesting to the public and his matter-of-fact friends that if he was engaged in a pursuit as altogether useless as that of literature, at least he wasn't taking it too seriously. That accounts for what Mr. Paine calls his "frequent assertions to the contrary." But part of this lax mood was involuntary, and is not to be attributed to his Southern temperament; it was the sign that he was essentially unemployed, it was the flapping as it were of those great sails the wind had never filled. There he was, a man, with all the powers and energies of a man, living the irresponsible life of a boy; there he was, an artist, a potential artist, living the life of a journalist; everything he did was a hundred times too easy for him; the goal he had set himself, the goal that had been set for him, was so low that it not only failed to enlist his real forces but actually obliged him to live slackly. He was thus a sort of individual analogy to the capitalist régime which, as Mr. Veblen describes it, is capable of reaping its profits only by maintaining throughout the industrial system in general a certain "incapacity by advisement." And in order to spare himself in his own eyes he convinced himself that this laziness was predestined. Mr. Paine's biography opens with these words: "On page 492 of the old volume of Suetonius, which Mark Twain read until his very last day, there is a reference to one Flavius Clemens, a man of wide repute 'for his want of energy,' and in a marginal note he has written: 'I guess this is where our line starts.'" If people are lazy, one imagines him saying to himself, it may sometimes be their own fault. But who can blame the man who is "born lazy," the man who is descended from a lazy line?
It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make speeches." That innocent réclame of his, that irresistible passion for the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that rôle the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the last man gave out from sheer exhaustion."
For all his exuberance, in short, he was not, on the whole, happy in his work; almost from the beginning of his career we note in him an increasing, distaste for this literary journalism which he would hardly have experienced if he had not been intended for quite another life. We remember that cry of distress when he was setting out on the Quaker City excursion, that cry which must have seemed so fantastically meaningless to those who read his letter: "I am so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.... An accusing conscience gives me peace only in excitement and restless moving from place to place." What was it but the conscience of the artist in him, lulled into a fitful sleep by the applause of all America before it had ever been able quite to penetrate into the upper layers of his mind? Mr. Paine has noted the change in tone between the first and second parts of "Life on the Mississippi," written with an interval of twelve years, the change from "art" to "industry," the difference "between the labors of love and duty": he avers that the second half might have been as glamorous as the first if Mark Twain had revisited the river eight or ten years earlier, "before he had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had become a background for pessimism." Mr. Paine would have his task explaining, in that connection, the difference between "theoretical" pessimism and pessimism of the other sort! For it was just so between "The Innocents Abroad" and "A Tramp Abroad"; it was even more so between "A Tramp Abroad" and "Following the Equator": "In the 'Tramp,'" says Mr. Paine, "he has still the sense of humor, but he has become a cynic; restrained, but a cynic none the less." All that descriptive writing in which alone, perhaps, he could count upon an absolutely certain financial success—how repellant it became to him as time went on! Watch him guilefully trying to wriggle out of the self-imposed task of "A Tramp Abroad." He tells his friend Twitchell that he has lost his Swiss note-book, and, who knows? perhaps he won't have to write the book, after all. Then the note-book comes to light, and he is plunged in gloom: "I was about to write to my publisher and propose some other book, when the confounded thing turned up, and down went my heart into my boots." It seemed to him, says Mr. Paine, "that he had been given a life-sentence." And to what does he turn for relief? "The Prince and the Pauper," which he lingers over and cannot bear to finish, telling Mr. Howells that, after that "veritable nightmare" of "A Tramp Abroad," nothing can diminish his jubilant delight in writing it. He is a child among children again, doing a task that almost any gifted child might have done, something that is for him the equivalent of a charade, a pretty game with his little daughters, and basking for the moment in the approval of his wife.
We have seen—and it seems to me the most conclusive proof of his arrested development—that Mark Twain showed not only no respect for literature but no vital, personal pride in his own pursuit of it. What is the true artist's natural attitude toward his work? Henry James, in his finical, exaggerated fashion, expressed it, I think—over-expressed it, in his passionate anxiety not to do so—in something he wrote once of his early tales: "I, of course, really and truly cared for them, as we say, more than for aught else whatever—cared for them with that kind of care, infatuated though it may seem, that makes it bliss for the fond votary never to so much as speak of the loved object, makes it a refinement of piety to perform his rites under cover of a perfect freedom of mind as to everything but them." Compare this with what Mark Twain wrote when he was setting to work at "The American Claimant": "My right arm is nearly disabled with rheumatism, but I am bound to write this book (and sell 100,000 copies of it—no, I mean 1,000,000—next fall). I feel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don't have to yell." That is only an extreme instance of what appears to have been his habitual attitude toward his work, an attitude of almost cynical indifference, of insolence even.
Once, however, he approached it in quite a different spirit, with a significant and exceptional result that proves the rule. "Though the creative enthusiasm in his other books soon passed," says Mr. Paine, "his glory in the tale of Joan never died": in a note which he made on his seventy-third birthday, indeed, when all his important works lay far behind him, he said: "I like the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well." Did he really consider it his best book? We shall see presently that in this, as in other matters, his judgment was quite unstable, quite unreliable, quite immature; and certainly, beside "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," no one else can take very seriously a work that is, for all its charm, scarcely anything but a literary chromo. Why, then, did Mark Twain look back upon it with such a unique satisfaction? It was because he had had no ulterior object in view in writing it, because, for once, in this book, he had approached his work in the spirit, at least, of the artist and the craftsman. "Possibly," we find him writing to a friend, and how exceptional the phrase is on Mark Twain's pen!—"possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing—it was written for love." But more striking still is the testimony of a later note: "It furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none." In other words, in this book alone he had consciously exercised the instinct of workmanship, the instinct he had exercised in that career as a pilot to which he always looked back so regretfully. What if "Huckleberry Finn" was incomparably greater? What if he had for "Tom Sawyer" a peculiar, an intimately proprietary, affection? There he had been simply the "divine amateur," improvising the tale of his own fond memories; and however much he loved them, he took no particular pride in the writing of them; he never thought of publishing them anonymously, as he published "Joan" at first, lest it should suffer from the obloquy of a pen-name that had been compromised by so many dubious ventures; he readily acquiesced, in fact, in his wife's attitude of indifference toward the always ungrammatical and often improper Odyssey of his own childhood. With "Joan of Arc" it was different: those twelve years of preparation, those two years of writing were the secret of his delight in it, his respect for it. A poor thing but indubitably mine, the spirit of the artist in him seems to be saying—that spirit which came into its own so late and burned so feebly then and was so quickly gutted out. Did he not call it "a book which writes itself, a tale which tells itself: I merely have to hold the pen"? It was indeed only in the dimmest sense a creation; it was nothing but a réchauffé for children, for sentimental, grown-up children. Something of his own personality, no doubt, went into it, the animus of a scarcely conscious, an obscurely treasured, ideal of the heroic life. But his pride and his joy in the book sprang, one feels, from a more specific achievement: he had never known so fully before what absorption means, what it means to take pains in all the complicated sense of honest workmanship.
If this explanation is the correct one, it is easy indeed to determine the measure of Mark Twain's maturity, to prove that he was at the same time a born artist and one who never developed beyond the primitive stage. Only once, and with a significant result in his own confession, have we found him working at literature as the artist works. But think of the care he lavished upon lecturing and oral story-telling! He was, says Mr. Howells, "the most consummate public performer I ever saw.... On the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably would not have been on the stage." And to what was this eminence due?—"his carefully studied effects." This man, who was capable of all but "yelling" his books into a phonograph, approached the platform with all the circumspection of a conscious master: there we find him prudent, prescient, self-respectful, deliberately taking pains, as he shows in one of his letters, to rest and equip himself beforehand. "Unless I get a great deal of rest," he says, and he makes no jokes now about his "laziness," "a ghastly dullness settles down upon me on the platform, and turns my performance into work, and hard work, whereas it ought always to be pastime, recreation, solid enjoyment." There is the voice of the artist, the prompting of the true craftsman's conscience. I have said that he was indifferent to technique, abnormally incurious, in fact, of all the means of the literary art. But who that has read his essay, "How to Tell a Story," will forget the proud skill of the raconteur of "The Golden Arm"? Those who imagine that an artist is just an inspired child of nature might well consider the attitude of mind revealed in this little essay. Mark Twain first heard the story of the "Golden Arm" from an old negro to whose cabin he used to resort as a boy in Hannibal; and just as we have seen him reverent in the Holy Land because of the initiation of the Sunday School, so now we see him reverent in art because of the initiation of that first master who had remained, indeed, save for Horace Bixby, the pilot, his only master. To tell that story rightly, to pause just long enough in just the proper places, to enunciate each word with just the accurate emphasis, and at last—oh! so warily, oh! so carefully, so cautiously, with such control, to spring that final effect of horror!—there was something worthy of a man's passionate endeavor! Did not Mark Twain assert again and again, in his old age, that no one can rise above the highest limit attainable through the "outside helps afforded by the ideals, influences, and training" of the society into which he is born? Who, in the Gilded Age of America, cared for literature, cared for it enough to celebrate it, to glorify it, to live it? What master in the highest of the arts had Mark Twain ever found comparable in relative authority, in essential authority, with that old negro raconteur, that old pilot of the Mississippi? What real criticism, what exacting appreciation had Mark Twain, the writer, ever received? Had not his wife, indifferent to his best work, encouraged him to write puerilities? Had not Howells even, the "Critical Court of Last Resort in this country," praised him as often for his ineptitudes as for his lucky flights of genius? Who had expected anything of him, in short, or put him on his mettle? But at least America understood the primitive art of oral story-telling, at least America had understood the primitive art of the Mississippi pilot: in those two spheres, and in those alone, Mark Twain had found inspiring masters, he had encountered a penetrating criticism, an apt, subtle and thrilling appreciation; in those two spheres he had been invited to pass muster and he had done so! What if he had never read "Balzac and the others"? That old negro of his childhood, with all his ancient, inherited folk-skill—he was Mark Twain's Balzac, and no young novelist ever more fervently humbled himself before the high priest of his métier, ever more passionately drank in the wisdom of the source, ever more proudly rose, by ardent endeavor, to the point where, before going his own way, he could almost do what the high priest himself had done. Mark Twain had never individually "come into his intellectual consciousness," in Mr. Howells's phrase, at all; his creative spirit had remained rudimentary and almost undifferentiated; but that his natural genius was very great is proved once more by the extraordinary zest with which he threw himself into those approximately artistic channels he found open before him.
It was one of Mark Twain's favorite fancies, Mr. Paine says, that life should begin with old age and progress backwards. We can understand it now; we can understand why his mind was essentially retrospective and why so much of his writing deals with his childhood. The autobiographical impulse is normal in old age: when men cannot build on hope they build on memory, their minds regress into the past because they no longer have a future. It is generally understood, therefore, that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by either internal or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open and fluid with possibilities. Who does not see in the extraordinary number of books about boys and boyhood written by American authors the surest sign of the prevalence of that arrested moral development which is the result of the business life, the universal repression in the American population of all those impulses that conflict with commercial success? So it was with Mark Twain. In him the autobiographical impulse, characteristic of old age, awoke very early: as far back as 1880 we find him "attempting, from time to time," according to Mr. Paine, "an absolutely faithful autobiography"; and he resumed the attempt in 1885, at the time when he was assisting Grant with his Memoirs. It remained his dominant literary impulse. "Earn a character if you can, and if you can't," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "then assume one." Mark Twain had "assumed" the character of his middle years; he had only truly lived, he had only been himself, as a child, and the experience of childhood was the only experience he had assimilated. That is why he was perpetually recurring to his early life in Hannibal, why the books he wrote con amore were books about childhood, and why he instinctively wrote not only about, but also for, children. By doing so he knew, or something in him knew, what many another American author has known since, that he was capturing the whole public. Ten million business men—that was the public, the masculine public, of Mark Twain's time. And are not business men in general, in a sense not quite intended by the coiner of the phrase, "children of a larger growth"?