The Ordeal of Mark Twain

to choose, he considers himself satisfied, willingly consenting that some other person, better qualified or more compet

GUES: The Peo

Gilded Age? For weeks after he reached Carson City he played about in the woods, "too full of the enjoyment of camp life" to build the fence about a timber claim which he and a comrade had loc

ndy-in fancy percales and patent leathers-in white duck and striped shirts-he had become the roughest of rough-clad miners, in rusty slouch hat, flannel shirts, coarse trousers, slopping half in and half out of the heavy cowskin boots." Merely, you imagine, the natural change in dress that any gold-seeker would have made? No: "he went even further than others and became a sort of paragon of disarray." An unmistakable surrender of the pride and consciousness of his individuality! And whoever doubts the significance of this may well compare the tone of his utterances as a pilot with such characteristic notes of his Nevada life as this: "If I were not naturally, a lazy, idle, good-for-

e can see that the spirit of the artist had about as good a chance of survival and development there as a butterfly in a blazing chimney: "Virginia had grown to be the 'livest' town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced. The side-walks swarmed with people. The streets themselves were just as crowded with quartz-wagons, freight-teams, and other vehicles.... Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was

is own. Furthermore, he now had his own financial record to live up to. It was the lucrativeness and prestige of the pilot's career that had originally enabled him to adopt it, and we know what pride he had had in his "great triumph," in being a somebody at last: his brother Orion had considered it a "disgrace" to descend to the trade of printing: they were gentleman's sons, these Clemenses! He had had, in short, a chance to exercise and educate his creative instinct while at the same time doing what was expected of him. And now, when he had lost his guiding-line, more was expected of him than ever! His salary, at twenty-three, on the river, had been $250 a month, a vastly greater income certainly than his father had ever earned: at once and of course, we are told, he had become, owing to this fact, the head of the Clemens fam

been fully aware of the demands of his creative instinct, therefore-and he was anything but fully aware of them-he could not have fulfilled them now and at the same time fulfilled his craving for wealth and prestige. Accordingly, he was obliged to acquiesce in the repression of his individuality. His frank freedom of sentiment, his love of reading, his constant desire for privacy-all those qualities that revealed his natural creative instinct-were, from the point of view of his comrades, just so many "pretensions": precisely in so far as they were "different" or "superior," they had to be taken down. The frequency and the force of these manifestations, and the tenacity with which, up to a certain point, he persisted in indulging in them, made him, as we know, a general butt. Many and "cruel," to use his own word, were the tricks his comrades played on him. Knowing his highly organized nervous system, they

n; the third said he would do the same. But I was going after an inquest and could not stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all their 'Overman' at six hundred dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it-and also to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried to force on me. These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave me as much as twenty-five feet of stock that

, could not fuse his spirit at all. It only made him frantic and lax by turns. He went off prospecting, and with what result? "One week of this satisfied me," he said. "I resigned." Then he flung himself into quartz-mining. "The letters which went from the Aurora miner to Orion," we are told, "are humanly documentary. They are likely to be staccato in their movement; they show nervous haste in their composition, eagerness, and suppressed excitement; they are not always coherent; they are seldom humorous, except in a savage way; they are often profane; they are likely to be violent. Even the handwriting has a terse look; the flourish of youth has gone out of it. Altogether they reveal the tense anxiety of the gambling mania." Then the pendul

s of his mother and a shame in the eyes of society. On the other hand, society and his mother wanted him to be a business man, and for this he could not summon up the n

ndings"-wrote letters, his companions thought, for they would hardly have left him in peace had they imagined he was writing anything else. All this time, plainly, his creative instinct was endeavoring to establish itself, with what mixed motives, however, we can see from the fact that he signed his first printed pieces with the pen name "Josh." "He did not care to sign his own name," says Mr. Paine. "He was a miner who was soon to be a magnate; he had no desire to be known as a camp-scribbler." How much meaning there is in that sentence!-all the contempt and hostili

of men famous all over the West for their wit and talent. It was to the Enterprise that Mark Twain had been sending his writings, and at last h

h an institution like that! There, in short, was his chance at last, as one might suppose; and how did he receive it? "In 'Roughing It,'" says Mr. Paine, "we are led to believe that the author regarded this as a gift from heaven and accepted it straightway. As a matter of fact, he fasted and prayed a good while over the 'call,'" and it was only when "the money situation" had become truly "desperate" and he had lost all hope of making his way as a miner that he accepted it. Before binding himself he set off at mid-night, alone and on foot, for a seventy-mile walk through uninhabited country: "He had gone into the wilderness," says Mr. Paine, "to fight his battle alone"; and we are told that he came out again eight days later with his mind still undecided. How different that all is from the mood in which he had entered upon his piloting career! There had been no hesitation then!

t had been stimulated to excess, in his heart of hearts he was not a money-maker but an artist, and the artist in him would naturally, as I say, have acclaimed this opportunity. In order to understand his reluctance, therefore, we must consider not only the hopes he was giving up with his mining career but the character of that opportunity also. Somehow, in this new call, the creative instinct in Mark Twain not only failed to recognize its own but actually foresaw some element of danger. What, briefly, did the Enterprise mean for him? He had been sending in his compositions; he had been trying his hand, experimenting, we know, in different styles, and only his humor "took." He had written at last a burlesque report of a Fourth of July oration which opened with the words, "I was sired by the Great American Eagle and foaled by a continental dam," and it was this that had won the editor's heart and prompted him to offer Clemens the position. "That," sa

d with his triumphant success, turned to him on their way back to the hotel and said with a groan, "Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself-I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It's ghastly. I can't endure it any longer." And all the next day, Mr. Cable says, he sedulously applied himself, in spite of the immense applause that had greeted him,

ork he would certainly have said something about it. What we actually find him writing is this: "I cannot overcome my repugnance to telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do." That he had no essential pride in this work, that it was not personal, that he did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a commodity we can see from the motives with which he chose his pen-name: "His letters, copied and quoted all along the Coast, were unsigned," says Mr. Paine. "They were easily identified with one another, but not with a personality. He realized that to build a reputation it was necessary to fasten it to an individuality, a name. He gave the matter a good deal of thought. He did not consider the use of his own name; the nom de plume was the fashion of the time. He wanted something brief, crisp, definite, unfor

of freedom gone. The city seems so cramped and so dreary with toil and care and business anxiety. God help me, I wish I were at sea again!" Work, writing, had become in his eyes identical with toil: "Clemens once declared he had been so blue at this period," says Mr. Paine, "that one morning he put a loaded pistol to his head, but found he lacked courage to pull the trigger." And observe, finally, what he writes to his mother from New York as he is about to start on the Quaker City excursion which is to result in "The Innocents Abroad" and his great fame. There are two letters, written within the same week of June, 1867; the eagerness of his youth does not suffice to explain their agitation. In the first he says: "I am wild with impatience to move-move-move!... Curse the endless delays! They always kill me-they make me neglect every duty and then I have a conscience that tears me like a wild beast. I wish I never had to stop anywhere a month." Th

not know what to write; my life is so uneventful. I wish I was back there piloting up and down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth-save piloting. To think that, after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!-"Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog"-a squib which would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward.'" He had thought so little of that story indeed that he had not even offered it to The Californian, the magazine to which he was a staff contributor: "he did not," says Mr. Paine, "regard it highly as literary material." We can see in that letter the bitter prompting of his creative instinct, in rebellion against the course he has drifted into; we can see h

ne, "was a passion of Sam Clemens's boyhood, a love of the spectacular that never wholly died.... Like Tom Sawyer, he loved the glare and trappings of leadership." The permanent dream of his childhood, indeed, had been to become "something gorgeous and active, where his word-his nod, even, constituted sufficient law." Here we see exhibited what Alfred Adler calls the "masculine protest," the desire to be more than manly in order to escape the feeling of insecurity, for Mark Twain, who was a weak child, could never have survived in the rough-and-tumble

book: his profits were $300,000, and it brought him into instant and intimate contact with the most distinguished people in America. Besides this, it brought him the recognition of The Atlantic Monthly. It brought him offers of political preferment: a diplomatic position, the postmastership of San Francisco, with a salary of $10,000 a year, a choice of five influential offices in California, anything he might be disposed to accept-"they want to send me abroad, as a Consul or a Minister," he writes from Washington: judges pledge the President's appointment, senators guarantee the confirmation of the Senate. It brought him presently a tremendous reception from "the brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the sheriffs of London-mine being (between you and me)," he writes to his publisher, "a name which was received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list of guests was called." It brought him an offer from at least one magazine of "$6,000 cash for twelve articles, of any length and on any subject." It brought him lecture engagements that paid him $1,600 in

never one to give himself airs; but to have the world's great literary center paying court to him, who only ten years before had been penniless and unknown, and who once had been a barefoot Tom Sawyer in Hannibal, was quite startling." Innocent barefoot boy! As if the true forces of criticism ever operated in the presence of a visiting foreigner! Mark Twain had not seen Englishmen applaud when Joaquin Miller, at a London dinner-table, thrust half a dozen cigars into his mouth at once and exclaimed: "That's the way we do it in the States!" He didn't know how much the tribute was a tribute to his oddity, his mere picturesqueness; he didn't know that he was being g

agents and other brokers in fame and bullion had begun to swarm about this popular young man like ravenous gulls in the wake of a ship. But the counsels of some of the most famous and revered men in America played into the hands of these agents, and surrendered Mark Twain over to them. Anson Burlingame, Henry Ward Beecher, even Artemus Ward-these m

yourself and your work. Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb." If Dostoievsky and Dickens and Victor Hugo had been constrained to accept such advice in their youth, where should we look now for "Crime and Punishment" and "Bleak House" and "Les Miserables"? We cannot blame Artemus Ward and Anson Burlingame for knowing nothing about the creative life and its processes; and how can we blame the poor, ignorant, unawakened poet in Mark Twain for not withstanding the prestige of men who, more than any others he had known, had won their spurs in the field of the spirit? Even if it had not already been too late, there were probably not ten souls in all America capable of so divining the spirit of this lovable child as to have said to him: "You were right in wishing to repudiate that line of least resistance. Put money and fame, superiors and inferiors, out of your mind. Break your ties now and, instead of climbing, descend-into life and into yourself." Mark Twain had followed Ward's injunction and "extended his audience eastward" by going East himself. He "never f

inct which only for a few years was to allow him inner peace, upon the vast welter o

inters' banquet in Keokuk, where he made his first after-dinner speech, his humor "delighted his audience, and raised him many points in the public regard." After that, he found, he was always the center of attraction when he spoke in public. It is significant, however, that from all his triumphs he had returned faithfully to his work as a printer, just as later he had held so passionately to the guiding-line of his trade as a pilot. That persistent adherence of his, in a society given over to exploitation, to a métier in wh

own in America-Mark Twain held himself to be, not a literary man, but a journalist. He had no plans for another book; as a newspaper owner and editor he expected, with his marriage, to settle down and devote the rest of his life to journalism." Hardly the frame of mind of the writer with a living sense of his vocation! And this expressed an attitude that Mark Twain never outgrew. Hear Mr. Paine again, at the time of

arm for me, and not because I was not familiar with other phases of life." And then he enumerates all the various r?les he has played, concluding that "as the most valuable capital or culture or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience I ought to be well-equipped for that trade." It does not concern him that under all these different costumes of the miner, the prospector, the reporter, the publisher, he has been the same man, that he has really experienced not life but only modes of living: the costumes are all different, and each one is good for a new performance. It is not the artist but the salesman that speaks here, the salesman with an infallible finger for the public pulse. No more lectures in churches, he tells his agent Redpath: "People are afraid to laugh in a church"; and again, to his publishing manager regarding "Pudd'nhead Wilson": "There was nothing new in that story"-"The American Claimant"-"but the finger-prints in this one is virgin ground-absolutely fresh, and mighty curious and interesting to everybody." Mark Twain, who prophesied a sale of 300,000 sets of General Gr

t's all right. The fortune didn't come, but it will. The fame has arrived; with this lecture and your book just out you are going to be the most talked of man in the country." It was true. But in that moment-that typical moment, in that reluctance, in that acquiescence, in that corroboration, Mark Twain's die had been cast. ... Who is this apparition we see "hobnobbing with generals and senators and other humbugs"? The Mark Twain who is going to walk the boards of the Gilded Age. In the hour of his triumph he writes to his mothe

iew his own life for justification of his belief. From this point on, his career was a steady process of what is called adaptation to environment. He had abdicated th