Mark Twain's view of man, in short, was quite rudimentary. He considered life a mistake and the human animal the contemptible machine he had found him: that argues the profundity of his own temperament, the depth and magnitude of his own tragedy, but it argues little else. The absurdity of man consisted, in Mark Twain's eyes, in his ridiculous conception of heaven and his conceit in believing himself the Creator's pet. But surely those are not the significant absurdities. "His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque," he wrote in one of those pseudo-Swiftian "Letters from the Earth," which he dictated with such fervor to Mr. Paine. "I give you my word it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists—utterly and entirely—of diversions which he cares next to nothing about here on the earth, yet he is quite sure he will like in heaven.... Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that. Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down. Many men pray, not many of them like to do it.... All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their lives. Monotony quickly wearies them. Now, then, you have the facts. You know what men don't enjoy. Well, they have invented a heaven, out of their own heads, all by themselves; guess what it is like?" How far does that satirical gesture carry us? It is too rustically simple in its animus, and its presuppositions about the tastes of humanity are quite erroneous: to sing, to play and to pray, in some fashion or other, are universal, admirable and permanent impulses in man. What is the moral even of that marvelous Odyssey of "Huckleberry Finn"? That all civilization is inevitably a hateful error, something that stands in the way of life and thwarts it as the civilization of the Gilded Age had thwarted Mark Twain. But that is the illusion, or the disillusion, of a man who has never really known what civilization is, who, in "The Stolen White Elephant," like H.G. Wells in his early tales, delights in the spectacle of a general smash-up of a world which he cannot imagine as worth saving because he has only seen it as a fool's paradise. What is the philosophy of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"? "That every man is strong," as Mr. Paine says, "until his price is named." But that is not true, to the discriminating sense, at all. It is an army of fifty-two boys that the Connecticut Yankee collects in order to start the English republic: in childhood, and childhood alone, in short, had Mark Twain ever perceived the vaunted nobility of the race. The victim of an arrested development, the victim of a social order which had given him no general sense of the facts of life and no sense whatever of its possibilities, he poured vitriol promiscuously over the whole human scene. But that is not satire: that is pathology.
Mark Twain's imagination was gigantesque: his eye, in later life, was always looking through the small end or the large end of a telescope; he oscillated between the posture of Gulliver in Lilliput and the posture of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. That natural tendency toward a magnification or a minification of things human is one of the ear-marks of the satirist. In order to be effectual, however, it requires a measure, an ideal norm, which Mark Twain, with his rudimentary sense of proportion, never attained. It was not fear alone then, but an artistic sense also that led him to suppress, and indeed to leave incomplete, most of the works in which this tendency manifested itself. One recalls his "3000 Years Among the Microbes," passages of which have been published by Mr. Paine. Glance at another example. "I have imagined," he said once, "a man three thousand miles high picking up a ball like the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.'" There we have the Swiftian, the Rabelaisian note, the Rabelaisian frame for the picture that fails to emerge. The fancy exists in his mind, but he is able to do nothing with it: all he can do is to express a simple contempt, to rule human life as it were out of court. Mark Twain never completed these fancies precisely, one can only suppose, because they invariably led into this cul-de-sac. If life is really futile, then writing is futile also. The true satirist, however futile he may make life seem, never really believes it futile: his interest in its futility is itself a desperate registration of some instinctive belief that it might be, that it could be, full of significance, that, in fact, it is full of significance: to him what makes things petty is an ever-present sense of their latent grandeur. That sense Mark Twain had never attained: in consequence, his satirical gestures remained mere passes in the air.
[CHAPTER XI]
MUSTERED OUT
"... a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the others were all still asleep." DMITRI MEREJKOWSKI.
And so we come to Mark Twain's last phase, to that hour when, outwardly liberated at last from the bonds and the taboos that have thwarted him and distorted him, he turns and rends the world in the bitterness of his defeat.
"Three score years and ten!" he said in that famous seventieth birthday speech. "It is the scriptural statute of limitations. After that you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out."
What a conception of the literary career! You see how he looks back upon his life?
"A pilot in those days," he had written in "Life on the Mississippi," "was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.... Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none." No wonder he had loved that earlier career in which, for once and once only, he had enjoyed the indispensable condition of the creative life. As for the life of literature, it had been for him, and he assumed that it was for all, a life of moral slavery. "We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print"! Shades of Tolstoy and Thomas Carlyle, of Nietzsche and Ibsen and Whitman, did you ever hear such words on the lips of a famous confrere? You, whose opinions were always unpopular, did you ever once, in the angelic naïveté of your souls, conceive the quaint idea of modifying a thought or a phrase because it annoyed some rich business man, some influential priest, some foolish woman? What were their flagellations, their gross and petty punishments to you, thrice-armored in the inviolate, immaterial aura of your own ingenuous truthfulness, the rapt contemplation of your noble dreams! Look with pity, then, out of your immortal calm, upon this poor frustrated child whom nature had destined to become your peer and who, a swan born among geese, never even found out what a swan was and had to live the goose's life himself! Yes, it is true that Mark Twain had never so much as imagined the normal existence of the artist, of the writer, who writes to please himself and by so doing brings eternal joy to the best of humanity—to whom old age, far from being a release from irksome duties, brings only, amid faltering forces, a fresh challenge to the pursuit of the visions and the hopes of youth. "You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase; you have served your term"! It is in the language of the barracks, of the prison, of an alien discipline at last escaped that Mark Twain thinks of the writer's life. "And you are mustered out."