MARK TWAIN.
THE Ordeal of Mark Twain " (Heinemann, 12s. 6d.) contains three leading images : a tragic portrait of America's most popular idol ; a relentless, pene- trating analysis of the background which enveloped and destroyed him ; and a self-portrait of the author, Van Wyck Brooks, one of the younger and probably the most powerful of contemporary Transatlantic critics. For those readers who are superficially familiar with Twain the buffoon, wearing his heavy mask of humour, and cutting shapeless capers for the amusement of the hordes which adored him, the revelation of the man behind will disclose " the saddest, the most ironical figure in all the history of this Western continent," a helpless, pitiful puppet in the hands of Melpomene reduced to commonplace terms of materialism, mob- monarchism and optimism. Those who have been moved to a study of American literature, its causes and effects, with a bias towards the so-called renascence of the last decade, and what is to come of it, will be intrigued primarily by the unfolding canvas of the dead-level civilization in which Twain was to lose himself through " countless masses of adjustments," as Whitman de- scribed the process. They will be interested in King Mark solely as the protagonist of a dead era, " an illusionist in the midst of his delusion, the symbol of the creative life in a country where," (to quote Clemens himself) " by the goodness of God, we have those unspeakably precious things : freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them." For that smaller group, the artists themselves, and among them particularly the men and women of the present generation who, through the gift of their own blood and bones, are groping towards the liberation of a folk expression which must indubitably stand as a cultural tradition of the Americans of to-morrow—for this curious, brave band in the wilderness, The Ordeal holds a potent polemic, closing on the defiant cadence : " Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces of your sensitive countrymen, remember the splendid parts your confreres have played in the human dramas of other times and other peoples, and ask yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as poets do."
For these readers Mr. Brooks is himself the left-motif in the story he relates with sue& a passion for intellectual honesty and integrity of utterance, and with so clear-cut a vision, based on practical experience with the past, of a race to come which shall bury the vestiges of the era that laid Twain under the hideous mask that beguiled the world and smothered the man. Twain might have grown to the stature of a satirist comparable with Vol- taire, Cervantes, Swift—as he was bracketed by his compromising contemporary, William Dean Howells. But he shrank from these heights to the hunchbacked, stunted proportions of a merry-andrew—as he is revealed by this uncompromising representative of the new America. Mr. Brooks, more than any other critic, has had the courage to remove successive American idols from their safe, respectable shelves, to grip them, dust them off,- force them under a logical lens, and, in many instances; to recast or even to break them. This is the most intimate aspect of his case against Twain and the race which repressed him. After any man has once established himself as an individual against the back- ground of a community, he emerges into the broad light of a definite perspective, and then, lest he grow successful, self-complacent, degenerate, requires the aid of creative criticism.
No ,man saved Mark Twain- froth his success. He remained throughout his career a " fumbling, frantic child," with Howells as " his father confessor in litera- ture," and with his family, led by that arch-Puritan, Mrs. Clemens, and his multitudes of friends and millions of readers serving as the unconscious ranks upon ranks of enemies who secretly crippled and killed the creator of at least one masterpiece : Huck Finn. Puritanism hemmed him in ; he had to conform to innumerable taboos, re- ligious, moral and social ; he had to write—privately, of course—" No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies." Outwardly, Twain accepted the egregious bugaboo which drove Whitman into his lonely lair at Camden, where he carried on " a perpetual guerrilla warfare against the whole literary confraternity of the age." Henry James and Whistler—and in our day the list is longer—fled to Europe, " to seek what necessarily became an exotic development." They were driven out by the vast conspiracy against the creative life, or " any mani- festation of the vital, restless, critical, disruptive spirit of artistic individuality."
Twain stayed behind and was defeated by the con- spiracy ; but let it not be forgotten that Whitman stayed behind and was not defeated ; on the contrary, that that obscure old man planted the first seeds of a free life ; that they have done something more than grow ; that they have inspired many of the lusty sons and daughters of Whitman to go and do likewise. At the present time America has a small army of novelists, poets, critics, dramatists, with a background of magazines and pub- lishers and a reading public to encourage and support both groups. Among-these people Puritanism, as it is known in America, is threatened with extinction. Had Twain been born among them he would have risen to the heights of a glorious satire ; as it is, one hopes that he will be remembered, outside of his one great work and some miscellanies, as America's last buffoon. Literature was for Twain " a life of moral slavery "—or, as he expressed it : " We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we modify before we print " To which Van Wyck Brooks retorts " Has the American writer of to-day the same excuse for missing his vocation ? " To which one writer—and many others like or unlike him—would reply, " No."
ALFRED KREYMBORG.
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