The Ordeal of Mark Twain

by Van Wyck Brooks

Almost incredible, in fact, to any one who is familiar with the normal processes of the literary mind, was Mark Twain's fear of public opinion, that fear which was the complement of his prevailing desire for success and prestige. In later life it was his regular habit to write two letters, one of which he suppressed, when he was addressing any one who was not an intimate friend upon any subject about which his instinctive feelings clashed with the popular view. These unmailed letters in which, as Mr. Paine says, "he had let himself go merely to relieve his feelings and to restore his spiritual balance," accumulated in such a remarkable way that finally, as if he were about to publish them, Mark Twain for his own amusement wrote an introduction to the collection. "Will anybody contend," he says, "that a man can say to such masterful anger as that, Go, and be obeyed?... He is not to mail this letter; he understands that, and so he can turn on the whole volume of his wrath; there is no harm. He is only writing it to get the bile out. So to speak, he is a volcano; imagining himself erupting does no good; he must open up his crater and pour out in reality his intolerable charge of lava if he would get relief.... Sometimes the load is so hot and so great that one writes as many as three letters before he gets down to a mailable one; a very angry one, a less angry one, and an argumentative one with hot embers in it here and there."

Tragic Mark Twain! Irresponsible child that he is, he does not even ask himself whether he is doing right or wrong, so unquestioningly has he accepted the code of his wife and his friends. That superb passion, the priceless passion of the satirist, is simply being wasted, like the accumulated steam from an engine whose machinery has broken down and cannot employ it.

Turn to one of these occasions when the charge of lava boiled up in Mark Twain; compare the two unsent messages he wrote and the message he finally sent to Colonel George Harvey when the latter invited him to dine with the Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference in 1905. To understand them we must recall Mark Twain's opinion that the premature end of the Russo-Japanese War was "entitled to rank as the most conspicuous disaster in political history." Feeling, as he did, that if the war had lasted a month longer the Russian autocracy would have fallen, he was bitterly opposed to the conference that had been arranged by Roosevelt. Here are the two telegrams he did not send:

To COLONEL HARVEY.—I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet those illustrious magicians who with the pen have annulled, obliterated and abolished every high achievement of the Japanese sword and turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and blithesome comedy. If I may, let me in all respect and honor salute them as my fellow-humorists, I taking third place, as becomes one who was not born to modesty, but by diligence and hard work is acquiring it. MARK.

DEAR COLONEL—No, this is a love-feast; when you call a lodge of sorrow send for me. MARK.

And this is the telegram he sent, which pleased Count Witte so much that he announced he was going to show it to the Czar:

To COLONEL HARVEY.—I am still a cripple, otherwise I should be more than glad of this opportunity to meet the illustrious magicians who came here equipped with nothing but a pen, and with it have divided the honors of the war with the sword. It is fair to presume that in thirty centuries history will not get done admiring these men who attempted what the world regarded as impossible and achieved it. MARK TWAIN.

Another example. In 1905 he wrote a "War Prayer," a bitterly powerful fragment of concentrated satire. Hear what Mr. Paine says about it: "To Dan Beard, who dropped in to see him, Clemens read the 'War Prayer,' stating that he had read it to his daughter Jean, and others, who had told him he must not print it, for it would be regarded as sacrilege. 'Still you are going to publish it, are you not?' Clemens, pacing up and down the room in his dressing-gown and slippers, shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.' He did not care," adds Mr. Paine, "to invite the public verdict that he was a lunatic, or even a fanatic with a mission to destroy the illusions and traditions and conclusions of mankind." The conclusions of mankind! And Mark Twain was a contemporary of William James! There was nothing in this prayer that any European writer would have hesitated for a moment to print. Well, "I have a family to support," wrote this incorrigible playboy, who was always ready to blow thirty or forty thousand dollars up the chimney of some new mechanical invention. "I have a family to support, and I can't afford this kind of dissipation."

Finally, there was the famous episode of the Gorky dinner. Mark Twain was always solicitous for the Russian people; he wrote stinging rebukes to the Czar, rebukes in the Swinburnian manner but informed with a far more genuine passion; he dreamed of a great revolution in Russia; he was always ready to work for it. When, therefore, Maxim Gorky came to America to collect funds for this purpose, Mark Twain gladly offered his aid. Presently, however, it became known that Gorky had brought with him a woman without benefit of clergy: hotel after hotel, with all the pious wrath that is so admirably characteristic of Broadway, turned them into the street. Did Mark Twain hesitate even for a moment? Did anything stir in his conscience? Did it occur to him that great fame and position carry with them a certain obligation, that it is the business of leaders to prevent great public issues from being swamped in petty, personal ones? Apparently not. The authors' dinner, organized in Gorky's honor, was hastily, and with Mark Twain's consent, abandoned. "An army of reporters," says Mr. Paine, "was chasing Clemens and Howells," who appear on that page for all the world like a pair of terrified children. "The Russian revolution was entirely forgotten in this more lively, more intimate domestic interest." What was Mark Twain's own comment on the affair? "Laws," he wrote, in a private memorandum, "can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted just the same.... The efforts which have been made in Gorky's justification are entitled to all respect because of the magnanimity of the motive back of them, but I think that the ink was wasted. Custom is custom; it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar." What would Emerson or Thoreau have said, fifty years before, of such an argument, such an assertion of the futility of the individual reason in the face of "brass, boiler-iron, granite" and mob-emotion? It is perhaps the most pitifully abject confession ever written by a famous writer.

This is what became of the great American satirist, the Voltaire, the Swift, the Rabelais of the Gilded Age. If the real prophet is he who attacks the stultifying illusions of mankind, nothing, on the other hand, makes one so popular as to be the moral denouncer of what everybody else denounces. Of the real and difficult evils of society Mark Twain, to be sure, knew little. He attacked monarchy, yes; but monarchy was already an obsolescent evil, and in any case this man who took such delight in "walking with kings," as the advertisements say, in actual life, never attacked the one monarch who really was, as it appeared, secure in his seat, the Kaiser. He attacked monarchy because, as he said, it was an eternal denial of "the numerical mass of the nation," He had become, in fact, the incarnation of that numerical mass, the majority, which, in the face of all his personal impulses, he could not consider as anything but invariably right. He could not be the spokesman of the immensities and the eternities, as Carlyle had been, for he knew them not; he could not be, like Anatole France, the spokesman of justice, for indeed he had no ideal. His only criterion was personal, and that was determined by his friends. "On the whole," as Mr. Paine says, "Clemens wrote his strictures more for relief than to print," and when he printed them it was because he had public opinion behind him. Revolt as he might, and he never ceased to revolt, he was the same man who, at the psychological moment, in "The Innocents Abroad," by disparaging Europe and its art and its glamorous past, by disparaging, in short, the history of the human spirit, had flattered the expanding impulse of industrial America. In the face of his own genius, in the face of his own essential desire, he had pampered for a whole generation that national self-complacency which Matthew Arnold quite accurately described as vulgar, and not only vulgar but retarding.

Glance at those last melancholy satirical fragments he wrote in his old age, those fragments which he never published, which he never even cared to finish, but a few paragraphs of which appear in Mr. Paine's biography. We note in them all the gestures of the great unfulfilled satirist he was meant to be; but they are empty gestures; only an impotent anger informs them; Mark Twain's preoccupations are those merely of a bitter and disillusioned child. He wishes to take vengeance upon the Jehovah of the Presbyterians to whom his wife has obliged him to pay homage; but the Jehovah of the Presbyterians, alas! no longer interests humanity. He is beset by all the theological obsessions of his childhood in Missouri; he has never even read "Literature and Dogma"; he does not know that the morbid fears of that old Western village of his have ceased to trouble the moral conscience of the world; he imagines that he can still horrify us with his antiquated blasphemies. He has lived completely insulated from all the real currents of thought in his generation. "The human being," he says, in one of his notes, "needs to revise his ideas again about God. Most of the scientists have done it already, but most of them don't care to say so." He imagines, we see, that all the scientists have, like himself, lived in Hartford and Elmira and married ladies like Mrs. Clemens; and as, according to Mr. Paine, nobody ever dared to contradict him or tell him anything, he never, dazzled as he was by his own fame, discovered his mistake. "The religious folly you were born in you will die in," he wrote once: he meant that he had never himself faced anything out. Was he, or wasn't he, a Presbyterian? He really never knew. If he had matured, those theological preoccupations, constantly imaged in his jokes and anecdotes about heaven, hell and St. Peter, would have simply dropped away from his mind: his inability to express them had fixed them there and his environment kept him constantly reacting against them to the end. Think of those chapters in his Autobiography which he said were "going to make people's hair curl." Several of them, at least, we are told, dealt with infant damnation; but whose hair, in this twentieth century, is going to curl over infant damnation? How little he had observed the real changes in public opinion, this man who lived, instinctively, all his life long, in the atmosphere of the Western Sunday School! "To-morrow," he tells Mr. Paine, in 1906, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006—which I judge they won't"; and what he dictates is an indictment of the orthodox God. He often spoke of "the edition of A.D. 2006," saying that it would "make a stir when it comes out," and even went so far, as we have seen, as to negotiate for the publication of his memoirs one hundred years after his death. He might have spared himself the trepidation. It is probable that by 1975 those memoirs will seem to the publishing world a very doubtful commercial risk.