The Ordeal of Mark Twain

march, uniform, majestic as the laws of bein

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is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature

the pioneer. Those great writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind with knowledge

ories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's career, which had

n a river "sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and 'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions

ng hold of life with a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe-an old, rank, delicious pipe-ham and eggs and scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart-these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for." A down-grade, going West: h

"create his preferences, his aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was Mark Twain's deduc

and business enterprise was virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully

open to all talents." It offered only one career, that of sharing in the material develop

g there a hermit in a shanty by the tunnel.... Perhaps some day-he felt it must be so some day-he would strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I must be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am conquer

for all the phenomena of religion figure in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone

re material possession, and the pursuit of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in cor

which it would not be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The property you own-be it

storical necessity, but rather a superstition," he was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal culture-for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: "Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth-here one has at once the end and the means of the simple

he chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay before some of them at least, that the mountains were full of gold and the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up some day in this wilderness, that these

active and uninteresting." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such is the result of the business process, and the success of the process required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtuall

with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a feudal castle, his wife is a chateleine, his children the baron's cubs, and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to

his country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases, becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers' Soci

ance of capitalistic industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins and the Morrises-in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of 1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While the intellectual life

masculated by the Civil War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, had formed habits

West! One might almost imagine that Nature itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the life of this New England count

think and dream, just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in Kansas City just the same. In a w

nt that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all masculine fiction. In short, he ha

d West alike, formed a closed ring as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what neces

ker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of glorified Methodist minister and reac

iddle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, of inarticulate misery-read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or next to none, to express i