Here, of course, we have what is by far the most important fact to be considered in any study of the creative life in the West; as we shall see, Mark Twain remained all his life in this sense a pioneer in his own view of the "special vocation" of literature. What is to be noted now is that the pilot was an exception, and the only exception in the Mississippi region, to this general social law. In Nevada, in California, where Mark Twain was to live later and where he was to begin his literary life, there were no exceptions; the system described by Mr. Croly reigned in its most extreme and uncompromising form; every one had to be a jack-of-all-trades, every one had to live by his wits. The entire welfare, almost the existence, of the population of the Mississippi valley, on the other hand, depended, before the war, upon the expert skill of the pilot; for the river traffic to be secure at all, he alone, but he at least, had to be a craftsman, a specialist of the very highest order. There were no signal-lights along the shore, we are told; the river was full of snags and shifting sand-bars; the pilot had to know every bank and dead tree and reef, every cut-off and current, every depth of water, by day and by night, in the whole stretch of twelve hundred miles between St. Louis and New Orleans; he had to "smell danger in the dark and read the surface of the water as an open page." Upon his mastery of that "supreme science," as it was called, hung all the civilization of the river folk, their trade, their intercourse with the great centers, everything that stirred them out of the inevitable stagnation of an isolated village existence. The pilot was, consequently, in every sense an anomaly, a privileged person, a "sovereign." Not only did he receive commands from nobody but he was authorized to resent even the merest suggestion. "I have seen a boy of eighteen," Mark Twain tells us, "taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere." Pilots were, he says, "treated with marked deference by all, officers and servants and passengers," and he adds naïvely: "I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes." Above all, and this was the anomaly to which Mark Twain, after many years of experience in American society, recurs with most significant emphasis, the pilot was morally free: thanks to the indispensability of that highly skilled vocation of his, he and he alone possessed the sole condition without which the creative instinct cannot survive and grow. "A pilot in those days," he says, with tragic exaggeration, "was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the manacled servants of parliaments and the people ... the editor of a newspaper ... clergymen ... 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."
Can we not see, then, how inevitably the figure of the pilot became a sort of channel for all the æsthetic idealism of the Mississippi region? "When I was a boy," Mark Twain says, "there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient," Think of the squalor of those villages, their moral and material squalor, their dim and ice-bound horizon, their petty taboos: repression at one extreme, eruption at the other, and shiftlessness for a golden mean. "You can hardly imagine," said Mark Twain once, "you can hardly imagine what it meant to a boy in those days, shut in as we were, to see those steamboats pass up and down." They were indeed "floating enchantments," beautiful, comely, clean—first rate, for once! not second, or third, or fourth—light and bright and gay, radiating a sort of transcendent self-respect, magnetic in its charm, its cheerfulness, its trim vigor. And what an air they had of going somewhere, of getting somewhere, of knowing what they were about, of having an orbit of their own and wilfully, deliberately, delightfully pursuing it! Stars, in short, pillars of fire in that baffling twilight of mediocrity, nonentity, cast-iron taboos and catchpenny opportunism. And the pilot! Mark Twain tells how he longed to be a cabin boy, to do any menial work about the decks in order to serve the majestic boats and their worthy sovereigns. Of what are we reminded but the breathless, the fructifying adoration of a young apprentice in the atelier of some great master of the Renaissance? And we are right. Mark Twain's soul is that of the artist, and what we see unfolding itself is indeed the natural passion of the novice lavished, for love of the métier, upon the only creative—shall I say?—at least the only purposive figure in all his experience. Think of the phrases that figure evokes in "Life on the Mississippi": "By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!" It was in this fashion that comrades of the wheel spoke of one another. "You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena Crossing. I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond breast-pin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn't he do if he was dead!" The adjectives suggest the barbaric magnificence of the pilot's costume, for in his costume, too, the visible sign of a salary as great as that of the Vice-President, of the United States, he was a privileged person. But the accent is unmistakable. It is an outburst of pure æsthetic emotion, produced by a supreme exercise of personal craftsmanship.
Mark Twain had his chance at last! "I wandered for ten years," he said in later life, when he used to assert so passionately that man is a mere chameleon, who takes his color from his surroundings, a passive agent of his environment, "I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and dictatorship of Circumstance.... Then Circumstance arrived with another turning-point of my life—a new link.... I had made the acquaintance of a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became a pilot." He had come to believe that he had drifted into piloting and out of it quite as aimlessly as he had drifted into and out of so many other occupations. But that hardly bears out his other assertion that to be a pilot was the "permanent ambition" of his childhood. Two instincts had impelled him all along, the instinct to seek a lucrative and respectable position of which his mother would approve and the instinct to develop himself as an artist: already as a printer he had exhibited an enthusiastic interest in craftsmanship. "He was a rapid learner and a neat worker," we are told, "a good workman, faithful and industrious;" "he set a clean proof," his brother Orion said. "Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination," adds Mr. Paine, of those printing days, "was given to Sam Clemens." He had naturally gravitated, therefore, toward the one available channel that offered him the training his artistic instinct required. And the proof is that Mark Twain, in order to take advantage of that opportunity, gladly submitted to all manner of conditions of a sort that he was wholly unwilling to submit to at any later period of his life.
In the first place, he had no money, and he was under a powerful compulsion to make money at almost any cost. Yet, in order to pass his apprenticeship, he agreed not only to forgo all remuneration until his apprenticeship was completed, but to find somehow, anyhow, the five hundred dollars, a large sum indeed for him, which was the price of his tuition. And then, most striking fact of all, he took pains, endless, unremitting pains, to make himself competent. It was a tremendous task, how tremendous every one knows who has read "Life on the Mississippi": "even considering his old-time love of the river and the pilot's trade," says Mr. Paine, "it is still incredible that a man of his temperament could have persisted, as he did, against such obstacles." The answer is to be found only in the fact that, embarked as he was at last on a career that called supremely for self-reliance, independence, initiative, judgment, skill, his nature was rapidly crystallizing. "Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with," he writes to his brother Orion, "and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And to-day, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and worship it! I want a man to—I want you to—take up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the very devil." Is this the Mark Twain who, in later life, reading in Suetonius of one Flavius Clemens, a man in wide repute "for his want of energy," wrote on the margin of the book, "I guess this is where our line starts"?
Mark Twain had found his cue, incredible as it must have seemed in that shiftless half-world of the Mississippi, and he was following it for dear life. We note in him at this time an entire lack of the humor of his later days: he is taut as one of the hawsers of his own boat; he is, if not altogether a grave, brooding soul, at least a frankly poetic one, meditating at night in his pilot-house on "life, death, the reason of existence, of creation, the ways of Providence and Destiny," overflowing with a sense of power, of purpose, of direction, of control. "I used to have inspirations," he said once, "as I sat there alone those nights. I used to imagine all sorts of situations and possibilities. Those things got into my books by and by and furnished me with many a chapter. I can trace the effect of those nights through most of my books in one way and another." He who had so loathed every sort of intellectual discipline, who had run away from school with the inevitability of water flowing down hill, set himself to study, to learn, with a passion of eagerness. Earlier, at the time when he had picked up that flying leaf from the life of Joan of Arc, he had suddenly seized the moment's inspiration to study Latin and German; but the impulse had not lasted, could not last. Now, however, nothing was too difficult for him. He bought text-books and applied himself when he was off watch and in port. "The pilots," says Mr. Paine, "regarded him as a great reader—a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences—a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know."
Mark Twain was pressing forward, with all sails set. "How to Take Life" is the subject of one of his jottings "Take it just as though it was—as it is—an earnest, vital, and important affair. Take it as though you were born to the task of performing a merry part in it—as though the world had waited for your coming.... Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose. The miracle or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit."
It is impossible to mistake the tone of this juvenile sentiment: it is the emotion of a man who feels himself in the center of the road of his own destiny.