Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
The French Revolution had thrust the abomination away forever, and he
thanked God for that “ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which
swept a thousand years of ... villainy away in one swift tidal wave of
blood.” He had no tears for Marie Antoinette. What was the Terror but
“a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of
blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures
out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and
shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell ...
that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been
taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”[580] The past
that had been consumed in that fierce conflagration had been a brutal,
tyrannical, superstitious past, and not till king and priest had been
flung out on the dung-heap did the people walk their native soil as
free men. The whole king business was preposterous to him; with Freneau
he cried, “Kings are the choicest curse that man e’er knew.” The battle
against medievalism had been fought and won and why go maundering back
over past battlefields, when other battles await?[581]
Mark Twain’s passionate republicanism was a product of the
Enlightenment as it had passed into the psychology of western
Americans, and it retained the militant idealism of Jeffersonian times.
It is shot through with the nature philosophy. In _The Prince and the
Pauper_, the heir of Offal Court and the heir of the Tudors are both
children of nature, endowed with warm hearts, generous sympathies,
and clever wits. Put rags on the prince and robes on the pauper and
their own kin cannot tell them apart. The latter, indeed, promises to
make the better king, for he has suffered the lot of the subject, and
not till the prince has put on rags does he come to know his people.
It is caste that breeds cruelty and wrong; the brutalities of the
English criminal code were deviltries devised by king and nobles to
safeguard their stealings. Only when the laws spring from the people
are they just. “The world is made wrong,” cried the young king when
he was brought out of prison to watch the burning at the stake of two
women who had befriended him--women whose only crime was that of being
Baptists--“the world is made wrong, kings should go to school to their
own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.” And this great lesson of mercy
is exemplified in the acts of the pauper king, who during his brief
reign tempers the harshness of the law with a sense of justice learned,
like Huck Finn’s, from sharp contact with reality.
It is in _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court_--a curious
medley, half philippic and half farce--that Mark Twain’s passion for
justice rises to white heat. The book has been grossly misunderstood.
It is not an attack on chivalry--at least not primarily; it is rather
an attack on thirteen centuries of reputed Christian civilization
that under pretense of serving God has enslaved and despoiled the
children of God. The keen satire is given point and edge by the long
tragic perspective. Thirteen centuries heavy with sorrow and misery
and frustrated hopes--a meaningless succession of foolish and futile
generations, wandering in fogs of their own brewing, hagridden by
superstitions, deceived and exploited by priest and noble, with no will
to be free--here is a perspective to correct our callow enthusiasms,
our revolutionary hopes! Why indeed should we expect men to possess
the will to freedom, seeing that each generation is molded after the
likeness of the past and none has been free? There is change, advance
and recession, but the story of the generations is no more than a “sad
drift between the eternities,” without purpose or meaning. In the
brain of the Connecticut Yankee are secrets hidden from the children of
King Arthur’s time--a curious ability to use the forces of nature, some
glimmerings of social justice. But to what purpose have Hartford and
the nineteenth century used their knowledge? It is a world of slaves
still as it was in King Arthur’s day. The human animal cannot lift
himself to heaven by his own bootstraps, and heaven will not stoop to
lift him. For a “clammy atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference,”
it has substituted smartness, vulgarity, irreverence.
As one slips back and forth between the two worlds the satire takes
on vaster perspectives; it cuts deep into all civilizations, for all
alike are sham, all have issued from the conquest of man’s native
intelligence by his superstitions that are too useful to his masters
to be dissipated. Clearly in Mark Twain’s philosophy of history the
hopes of the Enlightenment are fading. Passionately dedicated to the
program of the Enlightenment--freedom, individuality, humanitarianism,
democracy--his faith in reason, free will, progress, was burning low,
in presence of the historical record. The determinism that lurked
at the bottom of John Locke’s psychology, unperceived by the French
idealists, was revealing itself to Mark Twain and he was already
trimming his sails to the chill winds blowing from the outer spaces of
a mechanistic cosmos.
More immediately of course _A Connecticut Yankee_ is an attack on the
aristocratic romanticism of Sir Walter. There is little loitering in
the great hall--except to comment on the coarseness of the knights
and ladies--and much poking about in unlovely secret places where
one comes upon a rare collection of human animals thrust away in the
_oubliettes_ or pigging together in mean huts. Few chapters in American
literature are so noble in their _saeva indignatio_, so beautiful in
their stern simplicity, as certain sketches of the king’s progress
through his realm--not a royal progress but a peasant’s. There are no
tears in them, they go far beyond that. The scene in the smallpox hut
where the wife is glad her husband and daughters are dead--they are
either in heaven or hell, it makes little difference, for they are no
longer in Britain and so are happy; and the scene of the young mother
hanged for stealing a piece of cloth of an ell’s length or so, hanged
that property in Britain might be safe--such pictures reveal how far
he had traveled from the days of _Roughing It_. He was no longer a
good Federalist-Whig concerned about exploitation and the safeguards
of property. Although he voted the Republican ticket he made merry
over the tariff[582] and he frankly hated the dominant Republican
property-consciousness. Like Lincoln he was for the man rather than the
dollar when the rights of the two clashed. In these later years he was
steadily drifting to the left, on the side of the social underling,
sympathetic with those who do the work of the world. “He never went so
far in socialism, as I have gone,” said Howells, “if he went that way
at all ... but from the first he had a luminous vision of organized
labor as the only present help for workingmen.... There was a time when
I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in
the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that
this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever.”[583]
It is good for an American to read _A Connecticut Yankee_--and _Joan
of Arc_ as well; for in them is a flame that sears and shrivels the
mean property-consciousness which lays a blight on every civilization.
In the peasant girl of Domrémy, the rapt mystic led by her Voices,
Mark Twain found his ideal, the lily that bloomed out of the muck of
medieval times; and as he contemplated her life and work he was lifted
to the plane of worship. She had waged heroic warfare against the
embattled lies and shams and treacheries of a sordid age, and that she
should have died at the stake was inevitable. What other reward was to
be expected from bishops and kings and suchlike spawn of the devil? Not
till the people grow to manhood can any savior help them, and in that
day they will need no savior but themselves. The Sieur Louis de Conte
struggles with the idea confusedly.
I believe that some day it will be found out that peasants are
people. Yes, beings in a great many respects like ourselves. And
I believe that some day _they_ will find this out, too--and then!
Well, then I think they will rise up and demand to be regarded as
a part of the race, and that by consequence there will be trouble.
Whenever one sees in a book or in a king’s proclamation those words
‘the nation,’ they bring before us the upper classes; only those;
we know no other ‘nation;’ for us and the kings no other ‘nation’
exists. But from the day I saw old D’Arc the peasant acting and
feeling just as I should have acted and felt myself, I have carried
the conviction in my heart that our peasants are not merely
animals, beasts of burden put here by the good God to produce food
and comfort for the ‘nation,’ but something more and better. You
look incredulous. Well, that is your training; it is the training
of everybody; but as for me, I thank that incident for giving me a
better light, and I have never forgotten it.[584]
No Bayard ever did his devoir more knightly to his lady than Mark Twain
to Joan, finding in the noble drama of her life the romance he had
not found at Arthur’s court. The knights of the Round Table were “but
ghosts fighting in the fog,” but Jeanne D’Arc was human and lovable
and divine. And then the outlet through which his idealism had found
release slowly closed in, and he was left alone with his comfortless
speculations. What profits it to rail at the damned human race when man
has about as much chance for happiness as a blind puppy in a sack? The
bitter lot of humanity is due not to institutions alone or chiefly,
it is a part of the mad plan of a bleak mechanical universe. For Mark
Twain the solid earth was dissolving, leaving only a rack behind. It
is futile to lament. A sympathetic heart, indeed, is the last and
bitterest irony--for why weep over an evil exhalation! “_Life itself is
only a vision, a dream ... Nothing exists save empty space--and you._”
In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander
its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you
will remain a _thought_, the only existent thought, and by your
nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant,
have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams,
and better. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected
that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions,
fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically
insane--like all dreams ... the silly creations of an imagination
that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word that they are a
dream, and you the maker of it....[585]
So, like Cabell, Mark Twain asserts that man must build within and
by letting his dreams flow out create for himself such shelter as he
can against the chill of the eternal void. A flea on the epidermis of
earth, nevertheless he is thought and thought is deathless. To such a
conclusion did the buoyant youth of _Roughing It_ arrive in the dun
twilight years. _The Mysterious Stranger_ is only _Tom Sawyer_ retold
in the midnight of his disillusion.
What an ending for a child of the Gilded Age! In his youth a complete
frontiersman, with vast potential wealth within him, he hewed and
hacked at his genius, working the easiest veins, exploiting the most
accessible resources, wasting much to cash in on a little. And when in
the end the fool’s gold turned to ashes in his mouth, as a frontiersman
still he pursued his way alone, a solitary pioneer exploring the
universe, seeking a homestead in an ironical cosmos, until overwhelmed
by the intolerable solitude he made mock at all the gods. What a
commentary on the Gilded Age!