The Ordeal of Mark Twain

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umorous writing he regarded as something external to himself, as something other than artistic self-expression; and it was in consequence of pursuing it, we have divined, that he was arrested in his moral and esthetic development. We have seen, on the other hand, that he adopted this career because his humor was the only writing he did in Nevada that found an appreciative audience and that the immediate result of

f Letters in the old West. Artemus Ward, Orpheus C. Ker, Petroleum V. Nasby, Dan de Quille, Captain Jack Downing, even Bret Harte, sufficiently remind us of this fact. Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast. Plainly, also the humorist was a type that pioneer society required in order to maintain its psychic equilibrium. Mr. Paine seems to h

st unadulterated and uncompromising-sand." And as with the setting-so with the life. "High-strung and neurotic," says Mr. Paine, "the strain of newspaper work and the tumult of the Comstock had told on him": more than once he found it necessary-this young man of twenty-eight-"to drop all work and rest for a time at Steamboat Springs, a place near Virginia City, where there were boiling springs and steaming fissures in the mountain-side, and a comfortable hotel." That he found the pace in California just as difficult we have his own testimony; with what fervor he speaks of the "d--n San Francisco style of wearing out life," the "careworn or eager, anxious faces" that made his brief escape to the Sandwich Islands-"God, what a contrast with California and the Washoe"!-ever sweet and blessed in his memory. Never, in short, was a man more ra

had only placed themselves in a position where their instincts were blocked on every side. There were so few women among them, for instance, that their sexual lives were either starved or debased; and children were as rare as the "Luck" of Roaring Camp, a story that shows how hysterical, in consequence of these and similar conditions, the mining population was. Those who were accustomed to the exercise of complex tastes and preferences found themselves obliged to conform to a single monotonous routine. There were criminal elements among them, too, which kept them continually on their guard, and at best they were so diverse in origin that any real community of feeling among them was virtually impossible. In becoming pioneers they had, as Mr. Paine says, to accept a common mold; they were obliged to abdicate their individuali

sity of their mania, they were scarcely aware. Nevertheless, the human organism will not submit to such conditions without registering one protest after another; accordingly, we find that in the mining-camps the practical joke was, as Mr. Paine says, "legal tender," profanity was almost the normal language, and murder was committed at all hours of the day and night. Mark Twain tells how, in Virginia City, murders were so

was an impossible one, but, victims as they were of their own thirst for gold, they could not withdraw from it; and their masculine pride prevented them even from openly complaining or criticising it. In this respect, as I have already po

empting to pursue the artistic life directly because it was despised and because to have done so would have required just those expressions of individuality that pioneer life rendered impossible. On the other hand, sensitive as he was, he instinctively recoiled from violence of all kinds and was thus inhibited by his own nature from obtaining those outlets in "practical jokes," impromptu duels and murder to which his companions constantly resorted. Mr. Paine tells us that Mark Twain never "cared for" duels and "discouraged" them, and that he "seldom indulged physically" in practical jokes. In point of fact, he abhorred them. "When grown-up people indulge in practical jokes," he wrote, forty years later, in his Autobiography, "the fact gauges them. They h

can see from Mr. Paine's remark that his profanity seemed "the safety-valve of his high-pressure intellectual engine.... When he had blown off he was always calm, gentle, forgiving and even tender." We can best see his humor, then, precisely as Mr. Paine seems to see it in the phrase, "Men laughed when they could no longer swear"-as the expression, in short, of a psychic stage one step beyond the stage where he could find relief in swearing, as a harmless "moral equivalent," in other words, of those acts of violence which his own sensitiveness and his fear of consequences alike prevented him from committing. By means of ferocious jokes-and most of Mark Twain's early jokes are of a ferocity that will hardly be believed by any one who has not examined them critically-he could vent his hatred of pioneer life and all its conditions, those conditions that were thwarting his creative life; he could, in this vicarious manner, appease the artist in him, while at the same time keeping on the safe side of public opinion, the very act of transforming his aggressions into jokes rendering them innocuous. And what made it a relief to him made it also popular. According to Freud, wh

him on the spot" or some equivalent. "If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together," says Pudd'nhead Wilson, expressing Mark Twain's own frequent mood, "who would escape hanging?" His early humor, in short, was almost wholly aggressive. It began with a series of hoaxes, "usually intended," says Mr. Paine, "as a special punishment of some particular individual or paper or locality; but victims were gathered whole-sale in their seductive web." He was "unsparing in his

attacks and these pleas alike he was venting the humane desires of the pioneers themselves: that is the secret of his "daily philippics." San Francisco was "weltering in corruption" and the settlers instinctively loathed this condition of things almost as much as did Mark Twain himself. They could not seriously undertake to reform it, however, because this corruption was an inevitable part of a social situation that made their own adventure, their own success as gambling miners, possible. The desire to change things, to reform things was checked in the individual by a counter-desire for unlimited material success that throve on the very moral and political disorder against which all but his acquisitive instincts rebelled. In short, had Mark Twain been permitted too long to express his indignation directly in the form of satire, it would have led sooner or later to a reorientation of society that would have put an end to the conditions under which the miners flourished, not indeed as human beings, but as seekers of wealth. Consequently, while they admired Mark Twain's vehemence and felt themselves relieved through it-a relief they expressed in their "st

it is surely significant that this gentleman found the same trait exhibited in Mark Twain's "slow, guarded manner of speech." Perhaps we can understand now the famous Mark Twain "drawl," which he had inherited indeed, but which people say he also cultivated. Perhaps we can understand also why i

iss, we find, "especially suggested and emphasized a humorous work-that is to say, a work humorously inclined." We have already seen, in a previous chapter, that whatever was true of the pioneer society on the Pacific Slope was essentially true also of the rest of the American population during the Gilded Age, that the business men of the East were in much the same case

them and even, if the truth were known, to cry bloody murder. That was Mark Twain's habitual reaction, as we can see from the innumerable sketches in which he wades knee-deep in the blood of chambermaids, barbers, lightning-rod men, watch-makers and other perpetrators of the small harassments of life. Mark Twain was more exasperated by these annoyances of everyday life than most people are, because he was more sensitive; but, most people are exasperated by them also, and, as Mr. Howells says, all the American people of Mark Twain's time were exasperated by the same annoyances. They were more civilized individually, in short, than the primitive environment to which they had to submit: and Mark Twain's humor gave them, face to face as they were with these annoyances, the same relief it had given the miners in the West, afforded them, that is to say, the same "economy of expenditure in feeling." We "smile because" that humor shows us that we are all in the same boat; it

of the epoch of industrial pioneering. The whole nation was practically organized-by a sort of common consent-on the plan of a vast business establishment, under a majority rule inalterably opposed to all the inequalities of differentiation and to a moral and ?sthetic development in the individual that would have retarded or compromised the success of

implies a retardation of the business man's mental machinery, a retardation of the "strenuous life," the life of pure action: consequently, the business man shuns everything that distracts him, confuses him, stimulates him to think or to feel. Bad for business! On the other hand, he welcomes everything that simplifies his course, everything that helps him to cut short his impulses of admiration, reverence, sympathy, everything that prevents his mind from opening and responding to the complications and the implications of the spiritual and intellectual life. And this is precisely what Mark Twain's humor does. It is just as "irreverent" as the Boston Brahmins thought-and especially irreverent toward them!-when they gave him a seat below the salt: it degrades, "takes down," punctures, ridicules as pretentious and absurd everything of a spiritual, ?sthetic and intellectual nature the recognition of

Mark Twain's humor: let us see whe

he opera in Mannheim, finds himself

tudy. Her gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy rosebud of

finds himself actually, prevented as he is from expressing himself in any direct way, drifting into a rhapsody about her! What does he do then? He suddenly dashes a pailful of ice-water over this beautiful vision of his, cuts it short by a turn of the mind so sharp, so vulgar indeed, that the vision itself evaporates in

us" hoax in the opening paragraph of

ild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the se

cessories are ridiculously associated, and only the most careless reader will accept the ?sophagus as a bird." Mark Twain's sole and wilful purpose, one

m not to the human but to the common level, to puncture the reluctant reverence of the groundlings for the fact of moral elevation itself; and the success of that audacious venture, its success even with General Grant, was the final proof of the universal acquiescence of a race of pioneers in a democratic régime opposed, in the name of business, to the recognition of any superior value in the individual: what made it possible was the fact that Grant himself had gone the way of all flesh and become a business man. The supreme example of Mark Twain's humor in this kind is, however, the "Connecticut Yankee." "It was another of my surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making it grotesque and absurd," says the Yankee. "Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about with leather hat-boxes, and every time he overcame a

expressly made the American business man as good as Titian and a little better: it made him feel that art and history and all the great, elevated, admirable, painful discoveries of humankind were things not worth wasting one's emotions over. Oh, the Holy Land, yes! But the popular Biblical culture of the nineteenth century was notoriously, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, the handmaid of commercial philistinism; and besides, ancient Palestine was hardly a rival, in civilization, of modern America. "I find your people-your best people, I suppose they are-very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant-only talk about Europe," says a traveling Englishman in one of Howells's novels. "They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don't seem interested in their own country. I can't make it out." It was true, true at least of the colonial society of New England; and no doubt Mark Twain's dash of cold water had its salutary effect. The defiant Americanism of "The Innocents Abroad" marked, almost as defini

ical success it brought him. And are we not already in a position to see why the r?le of humorist was foreign to his

ion of his ?sthetic desires, the degradation of everything upon which the creative instinct feeds. How ca

very agreeable, indeed, to the complacent American business man, agreeable to the business man in himself, but in absolute violation of his own spirit. That is why his taste remained infantile, why he continued to adore "knightly trappings" instead of developing to a more advanced ?sthetic stage. His feelings for Malory, we are told, was one of "reverence": the reverence which he felt was the complement of the irreverence with which he acted. One cannot degrade the undegradeable: one can actually degrade only oneself, and the result of perpetually "taking thi

s life had deprived him. How many times he confessed that it was he who lacked the "courage"! How many times we have seen that if he lacked the courage it was because, quite literally, he lacked the "sense," the consciousness, that is to say, of his own powers, of his proper function! Satire necessitates, above all, a supreme degree of moral maturity, a supreme sense of proportion, a free individual position. As for Mark Twain, by reacting immediately to every irritating stimulus he had literally sworn and joked away the energy, the indignation, that a free life would have enabled him to store up, the energy that would have made him not the public ventilator that he became but the regenerator he was meant to be. Mr Paine speaks of his "high-pressure