The Ordeal of Mark Twain

he cannot afford to keep them. The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in w

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or at least one glowing decade, Mark Twain finds himself, as he says, "thoroughly and uniformly and unceasingly happy." He has not faced the conflict in his own soul, he has simply surrendered and repressed his leading instinct, and every great surrender brings with it a sensation of more or less joyous relief: were it not for the bitterness which that repression is destined to engender, who could regret indeed that he has found in quotidian interests

e character of "Boss Hanna"; trait by trait, it had now become the prevailing character of Mark Twain. Had he not endeavored to make himself over into another person, a person in whom his family might take pride and pleasure? He had striven to satisfy their standards, to do and feel and think and admire as they did and felt and thought and admired; and at last the metamorphosis had, to all appearances, taken place. Mark Twain had become primarily the husband,

eep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome-and we could not enter it unmoved." It is evident from this how much of the energy of Mark Twain's imagination had passed neither into his art nor, exactly, into his love, but rather into the worship of the hearth itself as the symbol, one might say, of his one great p

omething that would yield a return, not in paltry thousands, but hundreds of thousands. Like Colonel Sellers, he must have something with 'millions in it.'" This was the visible sign that his mode of living had now become permanently extravagant. In 1906, long after his wife had died and when he was living much of the time virtually alone, his household expenses amounted, according to Mr. Paine, "to more than fifty dollars a day. In the matter of food, the choicest and most expensive the market could furnish was always served in lavish abundance. He had the best and highest-priced servants, ample as to number." Certainly his natural taste, which was always, we are told, for a simple, inexpensive style, would never have set that scale: it was a habit he had formed in those early efforts to qualify as an admired citizen. And so was his "disposition towards an expansive, all-round life," a disposition that finally made all concentration impossible to him. "In his large hospitality, and in a certain boyish love of grandeur," says Mr. Paine, "he gloried in the splend

esitate, so confused were his artistic and his commercial motives, to promote under his own name. He had, moreover, an unfailing interest in the mechanical devices of other people. When he installed a telharmonium in his house at Redding he made a little speech telling his friends that he had been the first author in the world to use a type-writer for manuscript work-his impression was that "Tom Sawyer" was the first book to be copied in this way, but Mr. Paine thinks it was "Life on the Mississippi"-that he had been one of the earliest users of the fountain-pen, and that his had been the first telephone ever used in a private house. To this we can add that he was one of the first to use the phonograph for dictation and one of the first purchasers also of the high-wheeled bicycle. We can see one reason for this eager interest in mechanical inventions in the fact that out of it grew many of those adventures in financial speculation to which also, in true pioneer fashion, Mark Twain was drawn like steel to the magnet. He invested, and usually lost, large sums of money i

it was to be a "millionaire for ten days," and who had become the servant of no conscious creative principle, resist the propulsion of a demoralized money-sense? There, at least, that balked energy of his might express itself freely, gorgeously, to the applause of all America. We see him planning to make millions from a certain game of English kings; proposing a grand tour of authors-he and Howells, Aldrich and Cable, are to swing about the country in a private car, with himself as impresario and paymaster, "reaping a golden harvest"; calculating that the American business alone of the Paige Typesetting Machine is going to yield thirty-five millions a year. What if he and his family are, almost literally, killing themselves with anxiety over that infernal invention, which cost them three thousand dollars a month for three years and seven months? What if his life is broken by feverish business trips across the ocean, by swift and deadly forays against the publishing pirates of Canada?

nd ideals of the bourgeoisie. Success, prestige, position, wealth had become his gods and th

of all commercialized men: he worshiped, regardless of his own shadowy convictions, any one who was able to "put it over." We know what he thought of Cecil Rhodes, yet "I admire him," he said, "I frankly confess it, and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake." As for Mrs. Eddy, he finds her "grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees-money, power, glory-vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, illiterate, shallow, immeasurably selfish" ... yet still ... "in several ways the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. It is quite within the probabilities," he goes on, regarding the founder of Christian Science, "that a century hence she will be the most imposing figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration of our era."

become, we see, something of a snob: a fact illustrated by a sorry episode in Mr. Paine's biography which he remembered with a feeling of guilt and mortification. He had engaged a poor divinity student to go abroad with him and his family as an amanuensis and he told how that young man had met them, in his bedraggled raiment, on the deck of the ship, just as they were about to sail: "He came straight to us, and shook hands and compromised us. Everybody could see that we knew him." What supremely mattered to Mark Twain now was the pomp and circumstance of his own p

cent satisfaction over the march of what he was pleased to accept as progress, the purely quantitative progress of an expanding materialism; it bristles with statistics, it resembles, in fact, nothing so much as the annual commercial supplement of a Western newspaper. In 1875, when he was on one of his many pinnacles of prosperity, he wrote a Utopia, "The Curious Republic of Gondour." And what was the sort of improvement he showed there that he desired for the world? He suggested that

ous defence of "the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming, nineteenth, the mightiest of all the centuries," he was incessantly fighting his own instincts: we find him, in one situation after another, defending on the most factitious grounds, for trumped up reasons which he had to give his conscience but which he would have laughed at if any one else had used them, vindicating, frantically vindicating, causes which he loathed in his Heart but which he was constrained to consider just. Is it the Boer war? It is abhorrent to him, and yet he insists that England's hand must be upheld. He rages in secret for the weaker; in public, an infallible monitor keeps him on the winning side. All that year, we note, "Clemens had been tossing on the London social tide"; he had to mind his Ps and Qs in London drawing-rooms. And consider his remarks on the annexation of the Sandwich Islands. We can give them, he says, "leather-headed juries, the insanity law, and the Tweed ring.... We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization.... 'Shall we, to men benighted, the lamp of life deny'?" Do you imagine that he is overtly opposed to the annexation? No, we have Mr. Paine's word for it that this was Mark Twain's peculiar fashion of urging the step. At this very time he was coining money out of his lectures on Hawaii: he could hardly have afforded to take the unpop

dency was; yet he had a fatal way of entangling his loyalties with very dogmatic ministers of the gospel. We know what his instinctive economic and political tendencies were; yet the further he advanced in his business activities, and the more he failed in them, the more deeply he involved himself with all the old freebooters of capitalism. How, then, could he have developed and expressed any of these tendencies in his writings? He whose "closest personal friend and counselor for more than forty years," as Mr. Paine says, was the pastor of what he had once, in a moment of illumination, called the "Church of the Holy Speculators" in Hartford; who, from the depths of his gratitude, was to say of H.H. Rogers, when the latter rescued him in his bankruptcy, "I never had a friend before who put out a hand and tried to pull me ashore when he found me in deep water"-this man had given too many hostages to the established order ever seriously to attack that order. His dominant self had no desire to attack it; his dominant self was part and parcel of it. Some one offered him as a publisher a book arraigning the Standard Oil Co. "I wanted to say," he wrote, "the only man I care for in the world, the only man I would give a d-- for, the only man w

fectly at home with his public-he does not hesitate, in his speeches and asides, to pour out the most intimate details of his domestic life, knowing as he does that all America, all prosperous America, is just one good-humored family party. When he fails in business, cheques pour in upon him from every corner of the country: "It was known," says Mr. Paine, "that Mark Twain had set out for

tions and commercial speculation, an instinctive habit of subjugating all loyalties to personal and domestic loyalties. To this let us add, finally, the versatile career of the jack-of-all-trades. "I have been through the California mill," he said, "with all its 'dips, spurs and angles, variations and sinuosities.' I have worked there at all the different trades and professions known to the catalogues." And once, as if to sho

in 1868, he had written to his brother Orion: "I am in for it now. I must go on chasing [phantoms] until I marry, then I am done with literature and all other bosh-that is, literature wherewith to please the general public. I shall write to please myself then." Similarly, in 1899, almost at the other end of the span of his active life, he wrote to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as soon as I could afford it. At last I can afford it, and have put the pot-boiler pen away." Those two utterances show us clearly that the artist in him

forget his own books and works entirely; and the other evening, as papa and I were promenading up and down the library, he told me that he didn't expect to write but one more book, and then he was ready to give up work altogether, die, or do anything." Certainly he would never have so neglected, abandoned, his own writing to further the literary fortunes of General Grant, a task that almost any one might have done quite as well, if in his own writing he had been experiencing the normal flow of the creative life: he had thrown himself so eagerly into the publishing business precisely because his creative instinct had been thwarted. We have just seen what he said to Mr. Howells: "For several years I have been intending to stop writing for print as

gard for her husband. Finally, writer as he was, his enthusiasm for literature was as nothing beside his enthusiasm for machinery: he had fully accepted the illusion of his contemporaries that the progress of machinery was identical with the progress of humanity. Hear what he writes to his brother on one of the several occasions when the Paige Typesetting Machine seemed to be finished: "Dear Orion-At 12:20 this afternoon a line of movable types was spaced and justified by machinery, for the first time in the history of the world: and I was there to see. It was done automatically-instantly-perfectly. This is indeed the first line of movable types that ever was perfectly spaced and perfectly justified on this earth. All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical birth ... and also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had drank anything, and yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy, stupefied, stunned.... All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle." It is one ex-printer writing to another: how wonderful that machine must have seemed to a man whose hands remembered the grubby labor of the old village type-case! But then, Ma