[CHAPTER II]

THE CANDIDATE FOR LIFE


"One is inclined to say that the source of sensibility is dried up in this people. They are just, they are reasonable, but they are essentially not happy,"

STENDHAL: On Love in the United States.

In 1882, Mark Twain, who had been living for so many years in the East, revisited the great river of his childhood and youth in order to gather material for his book, "Life on the Mississippi." It was, naturally, a profound and touching experience, and years later he told Mr. Paine what his thoughts and memories had been. He had intended to travel under an assumed name, to pass unknown among those familiar scenes, but the pilot of the steamer Gold Dust recognized him. Mark Twain haunted the pilot-house and even, as in days of old, took his turn at the wheel. "We got to be good friends, of course," he said, "and I spent most of my time up there with him. When we got down below Cairo, and there was a big, full river—for it was high-water season and there was no danger of the boat hitting anything so long as she kept in the river—I had her most of the time on his watch. He would lie down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away; that there had been no war, no mining days, no literary adventures; that I was still a pilot, happy and care-free as I had been twenty years before."

Was it merely a sentimental regret, however poignant, that Mark Twain recorded in these words, a regret for the passing of time and the charm and the hope of youth? That little note of deprecation regarding his "literary adventures" sets one thinking. It is not altogether flattering to the self-respect of a veteran man of letters! And besides, we say to ourselves, if that earlier vocation of his had been merely "happy and care-free" a man of Mark Twain's energy and power could hardly, in later life, have so idealized it. For idealize it he certainly did: all his days he looked back upon those four years on the Mississippi as upon a lost paradise. "I'd rather be a pilot than anything else I've ever done in my life," he told his old master, Horace Bixby. "I am a person," he wrote to Mr. Howells in 1874, "who would quit authorizing in a minute to go to piloting, if the Madam would stand it." Quite an obsession, we see; and that he had found that occupation deeply, actively satisfying, that it seemed to him infinitely worthy and beautiful is proved not only by the tender tone in which he habitually spoke of it but by the fact that the earlier pages of "Life on the Mississippi," in which he pictures it, are the most poetic, the most perfectly fused and expressive that he ever wrote.

It was not a sentimental regret, then, that lifelong hankering for the lost paradise of the pilot-house. It was something more organic, and Mark Twain provides us with an explanation. "If I have seemed to love my subject," he says, among the impassioned pages of his book, "it is no surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it." A singular statement for a man to make out of the fullness of a literary life, the two pillars of which, if it has any pillars, are nothing else than love and pride! But Mark Twain writes those words with an almost unctuous gravity of conviction, and this, in so many words, is what he says: as a pilot he had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had not experienced it in literature. Strange as that may seem, we cannot question it; we have, simply, to explain it. The life of a Mississippi pilot had, in some special way, satisfied the instinct of the artist in him; in quite this way, the instinct of the artist in him had never been satisfied again. We do not have to look beyond this in order to interpret, if not the fact, at least the obsession. He felt that, in some way, he had been as a pilot on the right track; and he felt that he had lost this track. If he was always harking back to that moment, then, it was, we can hardly escape feeling, with a vague hope of finding again some scent that was very dear to him, of recovering some precious thread of destiny, of taking some fresh start. Is it possible that he had, in fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that career? It is a bold hypothesis, and yet I think a glance at Mark Twain's childhood will bear it out. We shall have to see first what sort of boy he was, and what sort of society it was he grew up in; then we shall be able to understand what unique opportunities for personal growth the career of a pilot afforded him.

What a social setting it was, that little world into which Mark Twain was born! It was drab, it was tragic. In "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" we see it in the color of rose; and besides, we see there only a later phase of it, after Mark Twain's family had settled in Hannibal, on the Mississippi. He was five at the time; his eyes had opened on such a scene as we find in the early pages of "The Gilded Age." That weary, discouraged father, struggling against conditions amid which, as he says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, wretched little children, sprawling on the floor, "sopping corn-bread in some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan"—it is the epic not only of Mark Twain's-infancy but of a whole phase of American civilization. How many books have been published of late years letting us behind the scenes of the glamorous myth of pioneering! There is E.H. Howe's "Story of a Country Town," for instance, that Western counterpart in sodden misery of "Ethan Frome"—a book which has only begun to find its public. This astonishing Mr. Howe, who is so painfully honest, tells us in so many words that in all his early days he never saw a woman who was not anæmic and fretful, a man who was not moody and taciturn, a child who was not stunted from hard labor or under-nourishment. No wonder he has come to believe, as he tells us frankly in a later book, that there is no such thing as love in the world! Think of those villages Mark Twain himself has pictured for us, with their shabby, unpainted shacks, dropping with decay, the broken fences, the litter of rusty cans and foul rags, how like the leavings of some vast over-turned scrap-basket, some gigantic garbage-can! Human nature was not responsible for this debris of a too unequal combat with circumstance, nor could human nature rise above it. "Gambling, drinking and murder," we are told, were the diversions of the capital city of Nevada in the days of the gold-rush. It was not very different in normal times along the Mississippi. Hannibal was a small place; yet Mr. Paine records four separate murders which Mark Twain actually witnessed as a boy: every week he would see some drunken ruffian run amuck, he saw negroes struck down and killed, he saw men shot and stabbed in the streets. "How many gruesome experiences," exclaims Mr. Paine, "there appear to have been in those early days!" But let us be moderate: every one was not violent. As for the majority of the settlers, it is to the honor of mankind that history calls them heroes; and if that is an illusion, justice will never be realistic. The gods of Greece would have gone unwashed and turned gray at forty and lost their digestion and neglected their children if they had been pioneers: Apollo himself would have relapsed into an irritable silence.

A desert of human sand!—the barrenest spot in all Christendom, surely, for the seed of genius to fall in. John Hay, revisiting these regions after having lived for several years in New England, wrote in one of his letters: "I am removed to a colder mental atmosphere.... I find only a dreary waste of heartless materialism, where great and heroic qualities may indeed bully their way up into the glare, but the flowers of existence inevitably droop and wither."

Here Mark Twain was born, and in a loveless household: the choice of his mother's heart, Mr. Paine tells us, had been "a young physician of Lexington with whom she had quarreled, and her prompt engagement with John Clemens was a matter of temper rather than tenderness." Mark Twain "did not remember every having seen or heard his father laugh," we are told, and only once, when his little brother Benjamin lay dying, had he seen one member of his family kiss another. His; father, absorbed in a perpetual motion machine, "seldom,' devoted any time to the company of his children." No wonder, poor man; the palsy of a long defeat lay upon him; besides, every spring he was prostrated with a nerve-racking "sun-pain" that would have checked the humane impulses of an archangel. Even his mother, the backbone of the family, was infatuated with patent medicines, "pain-killers," health periodicals—we have it from "Tom Sawyer"—"she was an inveterate experimenter in these things." They were all, we see, living on the edge of their nerves, a harsh, angular, desiccated existence, like so many rusty machines, without enough oil, without enough power, grating on their own metal.