Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
its flower and was quickly succeeded by another kind as the fields of
experience were re-plowed by industrialism and sowed to a different
grain. Mark Twain was the child of a frontier past--as Lincoln was, as
the Gilded Age was--and the America of today could no more breed him
than it could breed Lincoln, or Greeley, or Whitman; his Americanism
was the reflection of an environment that is no longer ours, in the
slack folk-ways of the frontier that we have outgrown. Child of the
Southwest in its early boom days, he was cradled in profitless schemes
and nourished on dreams of vast potential wealth. The frontier spirit
was an effervescence in his blood and golden expectations flung their
mirage over the drab reality. As a boy he took impress from a kindly,
ignorant, slave-holding, Calvinistic village world, and he quitted the
slattern village life to plunge into the picturesque traffic of the
Mississippi in the boom days when every river pilot drove his boat
full steam ahead. Then the Far West of silver mines and the Golden
Gate took him in hand--a gambling, romantic, optimistic frontier,
feverish with flush times, “a beggar’s revel of potential millionaires
without the price of a square meal.”[576] And finally this buoyant,
irreverent adolescent was taken in hand by the Far East: by New England
respectability in the persons of Olivia Langdon of Elmira, William Dean
Howells of Cambridge, Twitchell and Warner of Hartford; and by New York
in the persons of Carnegie and Gilder and Whitelaw Reid and Henry H.
Rogers, to be made over into a man of the world.
Such were his origins and his schooling. All his life he remained a
boy, with the imitativeness of youth, and yet with something deep
within him that cherished its own integrity. Quick to take color from
his environment and at home in crowds, he lived nevertheless in the
solitude of his own heart. Acutely conscious of his rough western
ways, he admired the culture of the Langdons and the refined art of
Howells, and he wanted to be approved by them. A kinsman of Beriah
Sellers, he delighted in the great barbecue and wanted to carve great
portions for himself, to heap up his plate as others were doing. His
reactions to experience were always emotional. He was not a Walt
Whitman to penetrate curiously to the core of his own being and grow
thence outwardly, content to wait till the world came round to him.
He loved to make a splurge, to be talked of, to be in the public eye,
to live on an ample scale; he accepted the world’s standards and
wished to be measured by them. It was characteristic of the frontier.
Wanting other standards, the frontier measured success by obvious
material standards. Its aggressive individualism was never spiritual or
intellectual or cultural. So with all his heritage of generations of
frontier individualism he never achieved an intellectual or spiritual
unity, an untroubled conscious integrity, as Emerson did and Whitman
did. He never was at home in the world of catholic thought, but all
his life he suffered from the petty inhibitions of his origins. He
could not throw off the frontier--its psychology and its morality were
too deeply intertwined with his primitive self; and the result was a
harassing inner conflict that left him maimed.
Yet with all his shortcomings--because of them indeed--Mark Twain is
an immensely significant American document. He is a mirror reflecting
the muddy cross-currents of American life as the frontier spirit washed
in, submerging the old aristocratic landmarks. To know Mark Twain is to
know the strange and puzzling contradictions of the Gilded Age. With
unconscious fidelity he reveals its crudity, its want of knowledge,
discipline, historical perspective; its intellectual incapacity to deal
with the complexities of a world passing through the twin revolutions
of industrialism and science. And he reflects with equal fidelity
certain other qualities that go far to redeem the meanness: a great
creative power; an eager idealism, somewhat vague but still fine; a
generous sympathy; a manly independence that strove to think honestly;
a passionate hatred of wrong and injustice and an honest democratic
respect for men as men. A significant if not an unsoiled or heroic
document!
That in his later years an impassable gulf opened between Mark Twain
and his generation, that the buoyant humorist of the seventies ripened
into the bitter satirist of the nineties, is a matter that has been
much remarked upon. The fact is clear enough but the explanation
is not so clear. In part no doubt--as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed
out--the change resulted from a thwarting of the creative artist by a
disastrous surrender to the ideals of the Gilded Age; in part, also,
it was the inevitable toll exacted by the passing years. A humane and
generous spirit cannot long watch with indifference the motley human
caravan hastening to eternity--cannot find food for laughter alone
in the incredible meanness and folly of men cheating and quarreling
in a wilderness of graves. Tenderness, chivalry, love of justice,
are poor bucklers to withstand the blows of fate, and Mark Twain had
little skill in defense. The humorist like the poet is sensitively
responsive to life and the scars multiply fast. Endowed with a nature
not unlike Swift’s in its fierce rage at inhumanity, not unlike Sir
Philip Sidney’s in its romantic chivalry, he was not a stoic to endure
with equanimity. He was foredoomed to suffer vicariously. The comment
he wrote Howells in 1899 throws a white light on the man. “I have been
reading the morning paper,” he said. “I do it every morning--well
knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses
and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me
to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human
race.”
Yet granting so much, and granting also a morbid conscience that
harassed him with self-condemnation--“What a man sees in the human race
is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart”--it
still remains true that the bleakness of his later years was due in
part, at least, to the insubstantial dwelling he chose to live in. The
architects of the Gilded Age were jerry-builders, and Mark Twain found
his jerry-built house a poor protection against the winter winds. It
was perhaps not greatly his fault that he built so flimsily. He was
too willing to be caught in the web of material things. He could not
reach out for companionship with the great earth. Hamlin Garland in a
bleak Dakota shack found help and comfort in the philosophy of Taine,
but Mark Twain could not get outside his own skin. He could not break a
path through the provincialism of his environment. He was held prisoner
to his own thoughts and his only release was through the window of
imagination. When harassed beyond endurance he sought release in
writing that hid the evidence of his rebellion. What would Livy say,
what would the American public say, if they knew he had come to deny
all the tribal gods!
There is no more pathetic figure in American literature than Mark
Twain, alone and solitary amid the blatant American crowd, living in
a dreary wash of speeches and banquets, spinning the threads of a
rebellious philosophy out of his own bowels, unaware of what others
were spinning, regarding himself as a dangerous fellow and stowing away
in his strong-box intellectual bombs that he thought too explosive for
the Gilded Age to play with. In his intellectual isolation he could
not take the measure of his speculations and he did not realize how
common were such conclusions--that his own generation indeed, under
the tutelage of the physical sciences, was fast drifting in the same
direction, and that the clouds of pessimism were obscuring for many
the brighter horizons of an earlier day. If he had known Henry Adams
as intimately as he knew Henry H. Rogers, very likely his eyes would
have been opened to many things that would have done him good. As it
was he knew only that his speculations ran counter to the formal creed
of his middle-class neighbors and friends. To deny the dogmas of the
conventional orthodoxy and in the face of a smug optimism to assert a
mechanistic pessimism, was an unpleasant business that he would have
avoided if he could.
But he couldn’t avoid it wholly, and in that fact is to be found the
thread that runs through his later life, giving to it such unity and
coherence as it possessed. It is this: here was a thoroughly honest
mind, that hated all sham and quackery and humbug, and a singularly
warm heart, that hated all wrong and cruelty and injustice; and this
honest mind and chivalrous heart, deceived and led astray by the mass
_mores_, espoused and defended such fragments of ideals, such bits
of truth, as he came upon in his solitary brooding, until driven
from one stronghold after another he came to doubt the adequacy
of all strongholds and took refuge in a black pessimism--God is a
malignant being, the universe is a machine, and man is a creature of
determinism. It was a fierce and stark reaction from the emotionalism
of the fifties--from Beecher’s God of love and Whitman’s religion of
democracy. His earlier loyalty to half-gods had brought him at last to
deny all the gods. And so a maimed giant, stumbling and uncertain, he
made such way as he could; and his journeyings wrung from him many a
fierce comment that his generation did not understand.
When the milk of western humor curdled in his veins, a Mark Twain
emerged who was a puzzle to the Gilded Age. A humorist who was a good
Republican and business man, the Gilded Age could understand; but a
satirist who launched his shafts at sacred things--at evangelical
religion, the Republican party, the government at Washington, the
damned human race itself--it could not understand. The professional
fun-maker had outgrown his audience. Expecting the familiar
exaggeration, they accounted his bitterest sally a characteristic
whimsy, and laughed when he commented bitterly on “this plodding sad
pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities,” or when he
exclaimed, “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor is
not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” But the significant
thing is that in the end the tyrannizing _mores_ did not conquer, they
did not destroy him wholly; but such convictions as he had hewn from
puzzling experience, however bleak or repellent they might be, he clung
to firmly, desperately, and at last flung them in the face of the
Gilded Age that had kept him prisoner.
The slow drift of Mark Twain’s thought from humor to satire--it smacks
of Philistinism to call it progress with its many false alarums and
excursions and its huge frontier wastefulness--is plain enough to
anyone who will take the trouble to chart his course. Roughly it
falls into definite stages: the swaggering gayety of western youth
in _Innocents Abroad_ and _Roughing It_--the mood of flush times,
down-grade with the brakes off; then a gay plunge into satire in _The
Gilded Age_; then the West recalled in middle life--_Tom Sawyer_, _Life
on the Mississippi_, _Huckleberry Finn_--living over again a youth
that is gone; then an excursion into the Middle Ages--_The Prince
and the Pauper_ and _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court_--a
romantic flare-up of the democratic passions of the Enlightenment; then
the search for the ideal in _Joan of Arc_--the dream of the perfect
woman, the Domnei of James Branch Cabell; and finally _The Mysterious
Stranger_ and _What is Man?_--a fierce satire of disillusion, the cry
of an idealist who realizes at last how greatly he has been cheated by
his dreams.
That he should have begun by burlesquing life was itself a broad
sign of his frontier origins. Since the first crossing of the