The Ordeal of Mark Twain

cy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel

t few years, than the pessimism of Mark Twain. During the last few years, I say, for his own friends and contemporaries wer

grown old with him could hardly, therefore, accept at its face value a point of view that seemed to be contradicted by so many of the facts of Mark Twain's life and character. Mr. Howells, who knew him intimately for forty years, spoke only with an affectionate derision of his "pose" regarding "the damned human race," and we know the opinion of his loyal biographer, Mr. Paine, that he was "not a pessimist in his heart, but onl

e of residence, and he was deluged with letters extolling him, whatever he did or said, if he won the world's pity when he got into debt and the world's praise when he got out of it, he was no sort of nine days' wonder; his country had made him its "general spokesman," he was quite within his rights in appointing himself, as he said, "ambassador-at-large of the United States of America." Since the day, half a century back, when all official Washington, from the Cabinet down, had laughed over "The Innocents Abroad" and offered him his choice of a dozen public offices to the day when the newspapers were freely proposing that he ought to have the thanks of the nation and even suggested his name for the Presidency, when, in his person, the Speaker of the House, for the first time in American history, gave up his private chamber to a lobbyist, and private cars were placed at his disposal whenever he took a journey, and his baggage went round the world with consular dispensations, and his opinion was asked on every subject by everybody, he had been, indeed, a sort of incarnation of t

and thunder; his atmosphere was charged with electricity. But the storm-clouds passed as swiftly as they gathered, and the warm, bright, mellow mood invariably returned. "What a child he was," says Mr. Paine, "always, to the very end!" He was indeed a child in the buoyancy of his spirits. "People who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them, who have the organ of Hope preposterously developed, who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine temperament!" he writes, referring to himself, in 1861. "If there is," he adds, thirteen years later, "one individual creature on all this footstool who is more th

half past 4," he writes to his wife, "I had danced all those people down-and yet was not tired, merely breathless. I was in bed at 5 and asleep in ten minutes. Up at 9 and presently at work on this letter to you." And again, the next year, his sixtieth year, when he had been playing billiards with H.H. Rogers, until Rogers looked at him helplessly and asked, "Don't you ever get tired?": "I was able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like. Don't you remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the villa? Well, it is just so in New York. I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I get up fresh and fine six hours later. I believe I have taken only one daylight nap since I have been here." Finally, let us take the testimony of Mr. Paine, who was with him day in, day out, durin

le, but literary men are always supposed to be that; he was old, and old people are often afflicted with doubts about the progress and welfare of mankind; he had a warm and tender heart, an abounding scorn of humbug: one did not have to go beyond these facts to explain his contempt for "the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," with its stock-in-trade, "Glass Beads and Theology," and "Maxim Guns and Hymn-Books," and "Trade Gin and Torches o

"A Tramp Abroad" and the drab and weary journalism of "Following the Equator," with those corroding aphorisms of "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," that constant running refrain of weariness, exasperation and misery, along the tops of the chapters, as if he wanted to get even with the reader for taking his text at its face value-all this might be attributed, as Mr. Paine attributes it, to the burdens of debt and fa

rosperous, he will not bite you. This is the

gether, to hurt you to the heart: the one to sl

" at Mark Twain's definition of man as a "mere coffee-mill" which is permitted neither "to supply the coffee nor turn the cra

t on mischief, and making a bludgeon of the malleable many." And, after all, he says, "the wicked world visited by the mysterious stranger is sixteenth century Austria-not these States." But is it? Isn't the village of Eselburg in reality Hannibal, Missouri, all over again, and are not the boys through whose eyes the story is told simply reincarnations of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, those characters which, as we know from a hundred evidences, haunted Mark Twain's mind all his life long? They are, at any rate, Mark Twain's boys, and whoever compares their moral attitude with that of the boys of Mark Twain's prime will see how deeply the iron had entered into his soul. "We boys wanted to warn them"-Marget and Ursula, against the danger that was gathering about them-"but we backed down when it came to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough nor brave enough to do a generous action when there was a chance that it c

living, envy i

die"-a strange complaint to come from t

ossession which outvalues al

gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor -death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers." T

ould have modified his temperament, not his point of view; they would have saddened him, checked his vitality, given birth perhaps to a certain habit of brooding, and this they did not do. We have, in addition to his own testimony, the word of Mr. Paine:

articular. "He had," says Mr. Howells, "a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scienticians." Mr. Howells tells how, on the advice of some sage, he and all his family gave up their spectacles for a time and came near losing their eye-sight, thanks to the miracle that had been worked in their behalf. But that was the least of his divagations. There was that momentary rage for the art of "predicating correlation" at Professor Loisette's School of Memory. There was Dr. Kellgren's osteopathic method that possessed his mind during the year 1900; he wrote long articles about it, bombarding his friend

them, that what interested him in them was the "soul-cure," the "mind-cure." Can he say too much in praise of Christian Science for its "healing of the spirit," its gift of "buoyant spirits, comfort of mind and freedom from care"? In fact, unless I am mistaken, his interest in mental healing began at a time when he and his family alike were free from illness. It is in 1886, when Mark Twain was at the very, summit of his fame, when he was the most successful publis

usations in which he charged himself, we are told, with having filled Mrs. Clemens's life with privations, in which he made himself responsible first for the death of his younger brother and later for that of his daughter Susy, writing to his wife, according to Mr. Paine, that he was "wholly and solely responsible for the tragedy, detailing step by step with fearful reality his mistakes and weaknesses which had led to their down-fall, the separation from Susy, and this final, incredible disaster"? Was there any reason why, humorously or otherwise, he should have spoken of himself as a liar, why he should have said, in reply to his own idea of writing a book about Tom Sawyer's after-life: "If I went on now and took him into manhood, he would just lie, like all the one-horse men in literature, and the rea

ish as possible," which would "make people's hair curl" and get "his heirs and assigns burnt alive" if they ventured to print it within a hundred years, the immense relief of his seventieth birthday, to him "the scriptural statute of limitations-you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out"-how are we to read the signs of all this hidden tragedy? For Mark Twain was right-things do not happen by chance, and the psychological determinism of the present day bears out in certain respects that oth

are the result of having transgressed some inalienable life-demand peculiar to one's nature. It is as old as Milton that there are talents which are "death to hide," and I suggest that Mark Twain's "talent" was just so hidden. That bitterness of his was the effect of a certain miscarriage in his creative

r." And finally, Mr. H.L. Mencken says: "Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist. There was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with the great artists of the Renaissance." An imposing array of affirmations, surely! And yet, unless I am mistaken, these last few years, during which he has become in a way so much more interesting, have witnessed a singular change in Mark Twain's reputation. Vividly present he is in the public mind as a great historic figure, as a sort of archtype of the national character during a long epoch. Will he not continue so to be for many generations to comet Undoubtedly. By whom, however, with the exception of two or three of his books, is he read? Mr. Paine, I know, says that "The Innocents Abroad" sells to this day in America in larger quantity than any other book of travel. But a number of explanations might be given for this, as for any other mob phenomenon, none

of an endowment, one cannot help thinking, more extraordinary than that of any other American writer. He seemed predestined to be one of those major spirits, like Carlyle, like Ibsen perhaps, or perhaps like Pushkin, who are as if intended by nature to preside over the genius of nations and give birth to the leading impulses of entire epochs. "I thought," said one of his associates in earlier years, "that the noble costume of the Albanian would have well become him. Or he might have been a Goth, and worn the horned bull-pate helmet of Alaric's warriors, or stood at the prow of one of the swift craft of the vikings." And on the other hand, hear what Mr. Howe

amateur"; his appeal is, on the whole, what Henry James called it, an appeal to rudimentary minds. But is not that simply another way of saying

s in two minds all the time. This, in itself a sign of immaturity, serves to warn us against his formal opinions. When, therefore, one appeals for evidence to Mark Twain's estimate of hi

ity, pretty confident of his own greatness. But it was only at moments. Mark Twain was a megalomaniac; only a megalomaniac could have advertised, as he did, for post-mortem obituaries of himself. But does that sort of megalomania express a genuine self-confidence? Does it not suggest rather a profound, uneasy desire for corroboration? Of this the famous episode of his Oxford degree is the most striking symbol. "Although I wouldn't cross an ocean again for the price of the ship that carried me, I am glad to do it," he wrote, "for an Oxford degree." Many American writers have won that honor; it is, in fact, almost a routine incident in a distinguished career. In the case of Mark Twain it b

"So," says Mr. Paine, "we rested in the Plaza Hotel until the appointed hour.... We left the Plaza Hotel and presently were amid the throng of outpouring congregations. Of course he was the object on which every passing eye turned, the presence to which every hat was lifted. I realized that this open and eagerly paid homage of the multitude was still dear to him, not in any small and petty way, but as the tribute of a nation." And must not the desire for approval and corroboration, the sense of insecurity, have been very deep in a quick-tempered, satirical democrat like Mark Twain, when he permitted his associates to call him, as Mr. Paine says they did, "the King"? Actual kings were with him nothing less th

, myself, 'Everybody reads it and that's something-it surely isn't pernicious, or the most acceptable people would get pretty tired of it.' And when a critic said by implication that it wasn't high and fine, through the remark, 'High and fine literature is wine,' I retorted (confidentially to myself), 'Yes, high and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.'" That is frank enough; he is not always so. There is a note of unconscious guile, the guile of the peasant, of the sophisticated small boy, in the letter he wrote to Andrew Lang, beseeching a fair hearing in England for the "Connecticut Yankee." He rails against "the cultivated-class standard"; he half poses as an uplifter of the masses; th

ially known in the poet whom he studied for a time with the na?ve self-abasement of a neophyte. Was it Mommsen? Read this humorous entry in one of his Berlin note-books: "Been taken for Mommsen twice. We have the same hair, but on examination it was found the brains were different." In fact, whenever he uses the word "literature" in connection with his own work it is with a sudden self-consciousness that lets one into the secret of his inner humility. "I am the only literary animal of my particular subspecies who has ever been given a degree by any college in any age of the worl

reat, is not, so to speak, at the disposal of their own spirits, are driven, as we see Mark Twain perpetually driven, to seek corroboration from without; for his inner self, at these moments, wished to be assured that he really was great and powerful like the Pacific and Shakespeare and the Czar. He resembled those young boys who have inherited great fortunes which they own but cannot command; the power is theirs and yet they are not in control of it; consequently, in order to reassure themselves, they are always "showing off." We are not mistaken, therefore, in feeling that in this comic impudence Mark Twain actually was interrogating destiny, feeling out his public, in other words, which had in its hands the disposal of that ebullient energy of his, an energy that he could not measure, could not estimate, that seemed to him simply of an indeterminable, untestable, and above all uncontrollable abundance. Did he not, in this childlike self-magnification, combined with an instinctive trust in luck that never left him, resemble the barbarian conquerors of antiquity? Not one of these, in the depth of that essential self-ignorance, that lack of inner control that makes one's s

rld and even the Almighty solicitous about him, and on the other, as a humble, a humiliated man, confessedly second-rate, who has lost nine of the ten talents committed to him and almost begs permission to keep the one that remains. A great genius, in short

ffee nor turn the crank." He confesses to a sort of proprietary interest and pleasure in the validity of that notion. "Having found the Truth," he says, "perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving impulse-the contenting of his own spirit-and is merely a machine and entitled to no personal merit for what he does, it is not humanly possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in patching and painting and puttying and calking my priceless possession

was "entitled to no personal merit" for what he had done, for what he had achieved in life; the pleasure he felt sprang from the relief his theory afforded him, the relief of feeling that he was not responsible for what he had failed to achieve-namely, his proper development as an artist. He says aloud, "Shakespeare could not create," and his inner self adds, "How in the world, then, could I have done so?" He denies "free will" because the creative life is the very embodiment of it-the emergence, that is to sa

instances the psychologists have placed before us, we need not look for an explanation of the chagrin of his old age. He had been balked, he had been divided, he had even b

to glance not only at Mark Twain's life and work, bu