Mark Twain, I say, instinctively wrote for children. It is true that he seems often to have believed that "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" could only be understood and appreciated by mature readers; certainly "Joan of Arc" was put forth as a historical romance for mature readers. But what do we find him saying while he is still at work on "Tom Sawyer"? "I finally concluded to cut the Sunday School speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls." And as for "Joan of Arc," with what did he associate it in his own mind? "I am writing," he says in a letter to a publishing friend, "a companion piece to 'The Prince and the Pauper,'" and this, added to the fact that he wrote it in constant, sympathetic consultation with his own children, is the best extrinsic proof of its real character. Written for children, then, more than half consciously, all these books were; and I will not except even "The Mysterious Stranger," permeated as it is with a mood that is purely adolescent, though an old man wrote it and few children probably have ever read it. Written for and written of children all these books were, for it is clear that the protagonists of "The Mysterious Stranger" are the boys through whose eyes the story unfolds itself and who taste its bitterness, and Joan of Arc, seen through the eyes of the Sieur de Conte, is a child also. And these, I say, were the books he wrote with love, with a happiness that sometimes seemed sacred to him. It was this happiness that haloed the tale of Joan, although Professor Phelps says that in 1904 he spoke of "Huckleberry Finn" as "undoubtedly his best book"; and that he had for "Tom Sawyer" a very special feeling is shown in a letter, one of those famous "unmailed" letters, written in 1887 to a theatrical manager who had dramatized the story and proposed to put it on the stage: "That is a book, dear sir, which cannot be dramatized. One might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. 'Tom Sawyer' is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." There were plays which he wrote with an exuberant gaiety; but that was the lusty fun of the man of action, the boy who enjoyed throwing sticks into a swift stream: it was not the happiness of the soul in process of delivering itself. That happiness, I say, sanctified these children's books alone—these books that suggest the green, luxuriant shoots clustering on the stump of some gigantic tree which has been felled close to the ground.
[CHAPTER VIII]
THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS
"Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable characters."ALEXANDER HARVEY.
At the circus, no doubt, you have watched some trained lion going through the sad motions of a career to which the tyrannical curiosity of men has constrained him. At times he seems to be playing his part with a certain zest; he has acquired a new set of superficial habits, and you would say that he finds them easy and pleasant. Under the surface, however, he remains the wild, exuberant creature of the jungle. It is only thanks to the eternal vigilance of his trainers and the guiding-lines they provide for him in the shape of the ring, the rack and all the rest of the circus-paraphernalia that he continues to enact this parody of his true life. Have his instincts been modified by the imposition of these new habits? Look at him at the moment when the trainer ceases to crack his whip and turns his back. In a flash another self has possessed him: in his glance, in his furtive gesture you perceive the king of beasts once more. The sawdust of the circus has become the sand of the desert; twenty thousand years have rolled back in the twinkling of an eye.
So it was with Mark Twain. "We have no real morals," he wrote in one of his later letters, "but only artificial ones, morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts." Now that is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts but upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. Mark Twain, as we have seen, had conformed to a moral régime in which the profoundest of his instincts could not function: the artist had been submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the respectable Presbyterian citizen. To play his part, therefore, he had to depend upon the cues his wife and his friends gave him. Here we have the explanation of his statement: "Outside influences, outside circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would not be valuable." We can see from this how completely his conscious self had accepted the point of view of his trainers, how fully he had concurred in their desire to repress that unmanageable creative instinct of his, how ashamed, in short, he was of it. Nevertheless, that instinct, while repressed, while unconscious, continued to live and manifest itself just the same. We shall see that in the end, never having been able to develop, to express itself, to fulfill itself, to air itself in the sun and the wind of the world, it turned as it were black and malignant, like some monstrous, morbid inner growth, poisoning Mark Twain's whole spiritual system. We have now to note its constant blind efforts to break through the censorship that had been imposed on it, to cross the threshold of the unconscious and play its part in the conscious life of this man whose will was always enlisted against it.
First of all, a few instances from his everyday life. We know that he was always chafing against the scheme of values, the whole social régime, that was represented by his wife and his friends. His conscious self urged him to maintain these values and this régime. His unconscious self strove against them, vetoed the force behind his will, pushed him in just the opposite direction. We find this conflict revealed in his story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," about an Italian counterpart of the famous Siamese monstrosity. "Whenever Luigi had possession of the legs, he carried Angelo to balls, rumshops, Sons of Liberty parades, horse races, campaign riots, and everywhere else that could damage him with his party and his church; and when it was Angelo's week he carried Luigi diligently to all manner of moral and religious gatherings, doing his best to regain the ground he had lost." This story of the two incompatible spirits bound together in one flesh is, as we can see, the symbol of Mark Twain himself.
Glance at his business life. He pursued it with frantic eagerness, urged on by the self that loved success, popularity, prestige. Yet he was always in revolt against it. There were years during which he walked the floor at night, "over-wrought and unsettled," as he said, "by apprehensions—badgered, harassed"—and let us add Mr. Paine's adjectives—"worried, impatient, rash, frenzied and altogether upset," till he had to beg the fates for mercy, till he had to send his agent the pathetic, imploring appeal, "Get me out of business!" Why did he always fail in those spectacular ventures of his? Was it not because his will, which was enlisted in business, was not supported by a constant, fundamental desire to succeed in it, because, in fact, his fundamental desire pointed him just the other way?
Then there was his conventional domestic and social life. He had submerged himself in the rôle of the husband, the father, the neighbor, the citizen. At once he became the most absent-minded of men! His absent-mindedness, Mr. Paine assures us, was "by no means a development of old age," and he mentions two typical instances of it when Mark Twain was "in the very heyday of his mental strength." Once, when the house was being cleaned, he failed to recognize the pictures in his own drawing-room when he found them on the floor, and accused an innocent caller of having brought them there to sell. Plainly the eye of the householder was not confirmed by the instinctive love that makes one observant. The vagrant artist in him, in fact, was always protesting against the lot his other self had so fully accepted, the lot of being "bullyragged," as he said, by builders and architects and tapestry-devils and carpet-idiots and billiard-table-scoundrels and wildcat gardeners when what was really needed was "an incendiary." Moreover, "he was always forgetting engagements," we are told, "or getting them wrong." And this absent-mindedness had its tragic results too, for because of it, to his own everlasting remorse, Mark Twain became the innocent cause of the death of one of his children and only just escaped being the cause of the death of another. On one occasion, he was driving with his year-old son on a snowy day and was so extraordinarily negligent that he let him catch a severe cold which developed into a fatal pneumonia; on the other, when he was out with one of his little daughters, he inadvertently let go of the perambulator and the baby, after a frightful slide down a steep hill, tumbled out, with her head bleeding, among the stones by the roadside. "I should not have been permitted to do it," he said of this first misadventure. "I was not qualified for any such responsibility as that. Some one should have gone who had at least the rudiments of a mind. Necessarily I would lose myself dreaming." Yes, Mark Twain was day-dreaming: that mind in which the filial and paternal instincts had almost supplanted every other caught itself wandering at the critical hour! And in that hour the "old Adam," the natural man, the suppressed poet, registered its tragic protest, took its revenge, against a life that had left no room for it. Truth comes out in the end. The most significant comment on Mark Twain's constant absent-mindedness as regards domestic matters is to be found in Mr. Paine's record that in his dictations in old age he was extremely inaccurate on every subject except the genesis and writing of his books. We can see from this that although his conscious life had been overwhelmingly occupied with non-artistic and anti-artistic interests, his "heart," as we say, had always been, not in them, but in literature.