The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

Do we not recall the early youth of that most unhumorous soul Henrik Ibsen, who, as an apothecary's apprentice in a little provincial town, found it impossible, as he wrote afterward, "to give expression to all that fermented in me except by mad, riotous pranks, which brought down upon me the ill-will of all the respectable citizens, who could not enter into that world which I was wrestling with alone"? Any young man with a highly developed individuality would have reacted in the same way; Mark Twain had committed the same "mad, riotous pranks" in his own childhood, and with the same effect upon the respectable citizens of Hannibal: if he had been as conscious as Ibsen and had not been obliged by that old pledge to his mother to make terms with his environment, his antagonism would have ultimately taken the form, not of humor, but of satire also. For it began as satire. He had the courage of the kindest of hearts, the humanest of souls: to that extent the poet was awake in him. His attacks on corrupt officials were no more vehement than his pleas on behalf of the despised Chinese, who were cuffed and maltreated and swindled by the Californians. In these attacks and these pleas alike he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it—a relief they expressed in their "storms of laughter and applause," they could not, beyond a certain point, permit it. Mark Twain, as we know, had been compelled to leave Nevada to escape the legal consequences of a duel. He had gone to San Francisco, where he had immediately engaged in such a campaign of "muck-raking" that the officials "found means," as Mr. Paine says, "of making the writer's life there difficult and comfortless." As a matter of fact, "only one of the several severe articles he wrote criticising officials and institutions seems to have appeared," the result being that he lost all interest in his work on the San Francisco papers. When, on the other hand, he wrote about San Francisco as a correspondent for his paper in the rival community in Nevada, it was, we are told, "with all the fierceness of a flaming indignation long restrained." His impulse, his desire, we see, was not that of the "humorist"; it was that of the satirist; but whether in Nevada or in California he was prohibited, on pain of social extinction, from expressing himself directly regarding the life about him. Satire, in short, had become for him as impossible as murder: he was obliged to remain a humorist.

In an old pamphlet about Mark Twain published in the eighties I discover the report of a phrenologist, one "Professor Beall" of Cincinnati, who found the trait of secretiveness very strongly indicated in the diameter of his head just above the ears. Such testimony, I suppose, has no value; but it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps we can understand also why it is that half the art of American humor consists in "keeping one's face straight." These humorists! They don't know themselves how much they are concealing; and they would be as surprised as anybody to learn that they are really social revolutionists of a sort who lack the courage to admit it.

Mark Twain, once committed to the pursuit of success, was obliged, as I say, to remain a humorist whether he would or no. When he went East to carry on his journalistic career, the publishers of The Galaxy, to which he became a regular contributor, specifically asked him to conduct a "humorous department"; and after the success of "The Innocents Abroad" his publisher Bliss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a humorous work—that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business men of the East were in much the same case as the pioneers of the West. The whole country, as we know, was as thirsty for humor as it was for ice water: Mark Twain's humor fulfilled during its generation a national demand as universal in America as the demand fulfilled in Russia by Dostoievsky in France by Victor Hugo, in England by Dickens. We have at last begun to approach the secret of this interesting fact.

I have spoken of the homogeneity of the American people during the Gilded Age. Mr. Howells has already related this to the phenomenon of Mark Twain's humor. "We are doubtless," he says, "the most thoroughly homogeneous folk that ever existed as a great nation. In our phrase, we have somehow all 'been there.' When [our humor] mentions hash we smile because we have each somehow known the cheap boarding-house or restaurant; when it alludes to putting up stoves in the fall, each of us feels the grime and rust of the pipes on his hands." We smile because! In that "because" we have the whole story of Mark Twain's success. The "cheap boarding-house," where every one has to pretend that he loves all his neighbors, is the scene of many restraints and many irritations; and as for the grime and rust of stove-pipes, that is a sensation very far from pleasant. Sensitive men, constrained by love and duty to indulge in these things, have been known more than once to complain about them and even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it relieves us from the strain of being unique and solitary sufferers and enables us to murder our tormentors in our imaginations alone, thus absolving us from the odious necessity of shedding the blood our first impulse prompts us to shed. Mr. Howells says that "we have somehow all 'been there,'" a phrase which he qualifies by adding that the typical American of the last generation was "the man who has risen." The man who has "risen" is the man who has become progressively aware of civilization; and the demands of the typical American of Mark Twain's time, the demands he made upon his environment, had become, pari passu, progressively more stringent, while the environment itself remained, perforce, just as barbarous and corrupt and unregenerate and "annoying" as ever. But why perforce? Because it was "good for business"; it was the environment favorable for a régime of commercial exploitation. Wasn't the "man who has risen," the typical American, himself a business man?

Now, we have already seen that this process of "rising in the world," of succeeding in business, is attained only at the cost of an all but complete suppression of individuality. The social effect of the stimulation of the acquisitive instinct in the individual is a general "levelling down," and this is universally conceded to have been characteristic of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation was practically organized—by a sort of common consent—on the plan of a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and æsthetic development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised the success of the business régime. We can see, therefore, that if Mark Twain's humor was universally popular, it was because it, contributed to the efficiency of this business régime, because it helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the businessman the country over precisely as it had at first helped to maintain the psychic equilibrium of the Western pioneer.

As a matter of fact, Mark Twain has often been called the "business man's writer." In that humor of his, as in no other literature, the "strong, silent man" who is the archtype of the business world, sees an aid rather than a menace to his practical efficiency. But why does he find it an aid and not a menace? Let us put the question the other way and ask why, in other forms of literature, he finds a menace and not an aid? The acquisitive and the creative instincts are, as we know, diametrically opposed, and, as we also know, all manifestations of the creative spirit demand, require, an emotional effort, a psychic coöperation, on the part of the reader or the spectator. This accounts for the business man's proverbial hatred of the artist, a hatred that expresses itself in a contemptuous desire to "shove him off the map." Every sort of spiritual expansion, intellectual interest, emotional freedom implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought—and especially irreverent toward them!—when they gave him a seat below the salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and absurd everything of a spiritual, æsthetic and intellectual nature the recognition of which, the participation in which, would retard the smooth and simple operation of the business man's mind, Mark Twain, as we shall presently see, enables the business man to laugh at art, at antiquity, at chivalry, at beauty and return to his desk with an infinitely intensified conceit in his own worthiness and well-being. That is one aspect of his humor. In another aspect, he releases, in a hundred murderous, fantasies of which I have mentioned several, all the spleen which the business life, with its repression of individuality, involves. Finally, in his books about childhood, he enables the reader to become "a boy again, just for a day," to escape from the emotional stress of maturity to a simpler and more primitive moral plane. In all these respects, Mark Twain's humor affords that "economy of expenditure in feeling" which, as we now perceive, the business man requires as much as the pioneer.

Glance, now, at a few examples of Mark Twain's humor: let us see whether they corroborate this argument.

In "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain, at the opera in Mannheim, finds himself seated directly behind a young girl:

How pretty she was, and how sweet she was! I wished she would speak. But evidently she was absorbed in her own thoughts, her own young-girl dreams, and found a dearer pleasure in silence. But she was not dreaming sleepy dreams,—no, she was awake, alive, alert, she could not sit still a moment. She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy rosebud of a mouth; and she was so dove-like, so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaped her thought,—and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: "Auntie, I just know I've got five hundred fleas on me!"

This bit of humor is certainly characteristic of its author. What is its tendency, as the psychologists say? Mark Twain has, one observes, all the normal emotions of a man confronted with a pretty girl: he has them so strongly indeed that he cannot keep his mind on the "business in hand," which happens to be the opera. He finds himself actually, prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself evaporates in a sudden jet of acrid steam. That young girl will no longer disturb the reader's thoughts! She has vanished as utterly as a butterfly under a barrel of quicklime. Beauty is undone and trampled in the dust, but the strong, silent business man is enabled to return to his labors with a soul purified of all troubling emotions.