The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

[CHAPTER X]

LET SOMEBODY ELSE BEGIN

"No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies."

A Double-Barrelled Detective Story.

"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire." In these words, which he addressed to Mark Twain himself, Bernard Shaw suggested what was undoubtedly the dominant intention of Mark Twain's genius, the rôle which he was, if one may say so, pledged by nature to fulfill. "He will be remembered," says Mr. Howells, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company." Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift! It was as a satirist, we perceive, as a spiritual emancipator, that those of his contemporaries who most generously realized him thought of Mark Twain. Did they not, under the spell of that extraordinary personal presence of his, in the magnetism, the radiance of what might be called his temperamental will-to-satire, mistake the wish for the deed?

What is a satirist? A satirist, if I am not mistaken, is one who holds up to the measure of some more or less permanently admirable ideal the inadequacies and the deformities of the society in which he lives. It is Rabelais holding up to the measure of healthy-mindedness the obscurantism of the Middle Ages; it is Molière holding up to the measure on an excellent sociality everything that is eccentric, inelastic, intemperate; it is Voltaire holding up to the measure of the intelligence the forces of darkness and superstition: it is a criticism of the spirit of one's age, and of the facts in so far as the spirit is embodied in them, dictated by some powerful, personal and supremely conscious reaction against that spirit. If this is true, Mark Twain cannot be called a satirist. Certain of the facts of American life he did undoubtedly satirize. "The state of American society and government his stories and articles present," says Miss Edith Wyatt, "is, broadly speaking, truthfully characteristic of the state of society and government we find now in Chicago, the most murderous and lawless civil community in the world. What is exceptional in our great humorist's view of our national life is not the ruffianism of the existence he describes for us on the Mississippi and elsewhere in the United States, but the fact that he writes the truth about it." Who will deny that this is so? Mark Twain satirizes the facts, or some of the facts, of our social life, he satirizes them vehemently. But when it comes to the spirit of our social life, that is quite another matter. Let us take his own humorous testimony: "The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin."

It has often been said that Mark Twain "lost his nerve." It ought to be sufficiently clear by this time, however, that he did not lose his nerve, simply because, in reality, he had never found it. He had never, despite Mr. Howells, "come into his intellectual consciousness" at all, he had never come into the consciousness of any ideal that could stand for him as a measure of the society about him. Moreover, he had so involved himself in the whole popular complex of the Gilded Age that he could not strike out in any direction without wounding his wife or his friends, without contravening some loyalty that had become sacred to him, without destroying the very basis of his happiness. We have seen that he had never risen to the conception of literature as a great impersonal instrument. An irresponsible child himself, he could not even feel that he had a right to exercise a will-to-satire that violated the wishes of those to whom he had subjected himself. Consequently, instead of satirizing the spirit of his age, he outwardly acquiesced in it and even flattered it.

If anything is certain, however, it is that Mark Twain was intended to be a sort of American Rabelais who would have done, as regards the puritanical commercialism of the Gilded Age, very much what the author of "Pantagruel" did as regards the obsolescent mediævalism of sixteenth-century France. Reading his books and his life one seems to divine his proper character and career embedded in the life of his generation as the bones of a dinosaur are embedded in a prehistoric clay-bank: many of the vertebræ are missing, other parts have crumbled away, we cannot with final certainty identify the portentous creature. But the dimensions help us, the skull, the thigh, the major members are beyond dispute; we feel that we are justified from the evidence in assuming what sort of being we have before us, and our imagination fills out in detail what its appearance must, or rather would, have been.

When we consider how many of Mark Twain's yarns and anecdotes, the small change as it were of his literary life, had for their butt the petty aspects of the tribal morality of America—Sabbath-breaking, the taboos of the Sunday School, the saws of Poor Richard's Almanac, we can see that his birthright was of our age rather than of his own. Hear what he says of "the late Benjamin Franklin": "His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, 'Remember what Franklin has said, my son, "A groat a day's a penny a year,"' and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts." He delights in turning the inherited wisdom of the pioneers into such forms as this: "Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow, just as well." Here we have the note of Huckleberry Finn, who is not so much at war with the tribal morality as impervious to it, as impervious as a child of another epoch. He visits a certain house at night and describes the books he finds piled on the parlor table: "One was 'Pilgrim's Progress,' about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough." And again, speaking of a family dinner: "Uncle Silas he asked a pretty long blessing over it, but it was worth it; and it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times." One may say that a man in whom the continuity of racial experience is cut as sharply as these passages indicate it was cut in Mark Twain is headed straight for an inferior cynicism; but what is almost destiny for the ordinary man is the satirist's opportunity: if he can recover himself quickly, if he can substitute a new and personal ideal for the racial ideal he has abandoned, that solution of continuity is the making of him. For Mark Twain this was impossible. I have already given many instances of his instinctive revolt against the spirit of his time, moral, religious, political, economic. "My idea of our civilization," he said, freely, in private, "is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made progress—the first progress in 'ages and ages'—colossal progress. In what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is a vast change (due to them) in ideals—do you admire it? All Europe and all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme ideal—all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that he belonged as naturally in the Opposition, as I have said, as all the great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his friends were the unconscious agents of the business régime, bent upon deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering?

Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed into the rôle that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country some of these days when the lazy canaille get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville," we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read 'The Age of Reason'": Mark Twain observed once that he had read it as a cub pilot "with fear and hesitation." A man whose life had been staked on the pursuit of prestige, in short, could take no chances in those days! The most fearful warnings followed Mark Twain to the end. In 1880 or thereabouts he saw his brother Orion, in the Middle West, excommunicated, after a series of infidel lectures, and "condemned to eternal flames" by his own Church, the Presbyterian Church. "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" were constantly being suppressed as immoral by the public libraries, and not in rural districts merely but in great centers: in Denver and Omaha in 1903, in godly Brooklyn as late as 1906. If the morals of those boys were considered heretical, what would have been thought of Mark Twain's other opinions? Even the title he suggested for his first important book—"The New Pilgrim's Progress"—was regarded in Hartford as a sacrilege. The trustees of the American Publishing Company flatly refused to have anything to do with it, and it was only when the money-charmer Bliss threatened to resign if he was not allowed to publish the book that these pious gentlemen, who abhorred heresy, but loved money more than they abhorred heresy, gave in. It was these same gentlemen who later became Mark Twain's neighbors and daily associates: it was with them he shared that happy Hartford society upon whose "community of interests" and "unity of ideals" the loyal Mr. Paine is obliged to dwell in his biography. Was Mark Twain to be expected to attack them?

His spirit was indeed quiescent during the middle years of his life: it is only in his early work, and only in his minor work, his "Sketches," that we find, smuggled in as it were among so many other notes, the frank note of the satirist. One recalls the promise he had made, as a sort of oblique acknowledgment of his father-in-law's loan, to the readers of his Buffalo paper: "I only want to assure parties having a friendly interest in the prosperity of the journal that I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, nor in any way attempt to make trouble." He, that "rough Western miner" on probation, knew that he could not be too circumspect. And yet among those early sketches a risky note now and then intrudes itself: "A Mysterious Visit," for example, that very telling animadversion upon a society in which "thousands of the richest and proudest, the most respected, honored and courted men" lie about their income to the tax-collector "every year." Is it not the case, however, that as time went on he got into the habit of somehow not noticing these little spots on the American sun?