The Slavery of Mark Twain
By SEAN O'FAOLAIN
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS died in 1910 with a reputation, and a fame, equalled only by such writers as Dickens and Shaw. Mr. Kipling thought of him as " great and godlike." Howells told him he would " bask in the same light as Cervantes and Shakespeare." Mr. Shaw declared that America Lad produced only two geniuses, Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. These and many other judgements by contemporary critics are recorded in this biography. It also records his Calvinist background among the Mississippi swamps, his life as a pilot on the river—his pseudonym was from a cry used by the pilots when taking soundings, and it conveyed, prophetically his biographer thinks, the meaning " safe water " ; and having followed him to the Nevada mines and the great gold-boons of Virginia City, and his first journalistic enterprise in the West, we see him reap an unusual success with Innocents Abroad, married into a bourgeois coal-magnate's family, and leave him for the rest of his life a slave to his surroundings and his success. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks' analysis of Mark Twain's character is summed up in this sentence : " His wish to be an artist, which had been so frowned upon and had encountered such an obstacle in the disapproval of his mother, was now repreised, more or less definitely, and another wish, that of winning Approval, which inclined him to conforni with public opinion, had supplanted it."
And he quotes repeatedly Twain's own apologia, by way of commentary : " Outside influences, outside circumstances, wind the man and regulate him. Left to himself he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would not be valuable."
Which is, indeed, the comment of a slave -who hardly prizes freedom.
Mark Twain, in brief, was a case of arrested development. He sold himself, for the .sake of respectability, money, wife, mother, America, and good-fellowship, to the half-gods of literature. But he was always conscious of his surrender and he ended by becoming a despairing cynic. His humorous writing he regarded as something external. to himself, as something other than artistic self-expression ;' and in conse- quence of pursuing it, he was arrested in his moral and aesthetic development." So his biographer, and in his chapter on Mark Twain's humour, he produces adequate proof as to the brass in Twain's coinage, if proof be needed in a country that never took Twain to heart as America did ; that, for example, was not impressed by either of his two great American successes, The Connecticut Yankee or Innocents Abroad. Twain, he says, was the business-man's joy and the artist's despair. He sneered at what the business-man did not prize, and privately, in " urunalled letters " and the like, told the truth he was afraid to tell in public.
Here is a pitiable story, surely, and one that would be tragic if one could only feel more admiration for its chief actor. We are accustomed to think of the professional humorist as either endlessly gay, or weeping over life behind his motley ; this picture shows a man of immense talent, a man of at any rate perforated genius, snivelling while he pockets most satisfying profits and manoeuvres for more, because he is not permitted to be the true self that—he knows—will bring him none. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks uses the hardest words for Mark Twain, and though as one reads his book, one begins by pitying Twain, one ends by joining him in contempt
for the " moral slave," the unconscious sycophant," the " chameleon."
The story and the analysis is done by a critic who com- mands his material, told with vigour and an unfailing interest in , the subject. One feels, however, that Mr. Van Wyck Brooks thought rather while he wrote than before he wrote, His very fine chapter on the times and environment of Twain lead one to pity Twain, by leading one to conclude that such circumstances could not but " wind the man " inexorably. But as he progresses and the list of Twain's tergiversations and surrenders and self-deceptions, and sheer dishonesties increases, it is plain that his judgement has meanwhile been given against the defendant. It is " poor .., • .
The Ordeal of Mark Twain. By Van Wyck Brooks. (Dent. 10s. 6d.) wretch " to begin. It ends with " moral coward." " It ought to be sufficiently clear," he says, " that he did not lose his nerve (as was often said) simply because, in reality, he had never found it." This alteration of opinion is a grave fault in a fine book.
The question is, whether Mark Twain was a thwarted genius or a mere man of talent, " a divine amateur," as Arnold Bennett called him, and very acutely. The comparison with Dickens is appropriate. Here, too, was a man pandering to his times, a born showman, a man with the same vanities, the same desire for ostentation, the same eye to the main chance, working, too, in an atmosphere not unlike the bourgeois atmosphere of America's period of industrial expansion, a man who loved the " respectable," a humorist, a panderer to the opinions of his times, and in between a fighter for the weak. A good deal of Dickens has been, in the American phrase, " debunked." But the genius of the man. was far too great ever to be wholly diminished by time. Twain wrote one great book, one beautiful book, Huckleberry Finn. Dickens wrote ,a dozen Huckleberry Finns, and their greatness breakS through the sham that is in them and we 'forget everything but that greatness when we lay his best work aside.
There are surely three main essentials for the making of a genius : in terms that may perhaps refer rather than define, they are. the uncontrollable desire to create, the self- germinating imagination, and a stern intellectual control. Other terms have been used for these things, but the things remain. Rodin spoke of " patience and conscience," instead of speaking of intellectual control ; and Masson found in Keats the lack of " a reflective and constructive intellect "- in the Keats, that is, of, say, Sleep and Poetry, though not in the Keats of the Odes. And it may be that when Proust spoke of the " involuntary memory " he was thinking of the geyser of the imagination. In Mark Twain, according to his biographer, there was a daemonic urge to write, but an inadequate control. Surely it was a case of an inadequate creative urge ? For when he toiled for six years over Huckleberry Finn the control was there unfailingly. The truth is that one does not measure genius by poten- tialities but by achievement, so that to speak of thwarted genius is merely to speak of untempered steel, malleable, ineffectual, of an urge whose momentum flags before it has well begun its course. Mark Twain attempted to defend himself by saying, as he looked out on the America to which he had sold himself, that it is not the urge but the environ- ment that counts, and that if Shakespeare had been born on a desert rock he would not have been able to create. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks retorts, Why did he not ask what Shakes- peare would have done if he were born in America ? In fact neither hypothesis is profitable, and the true retort is that men are not born on desert rocks. It might also be said that it is also a characteristic of the intellect of a genius that it cuts his cloth for him according .to his measure, as it did for Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte, Hawthorne and Bunyan and Thoreau and Pliny and Proust, and a host of other people whose environment would have bored Mark Twain to profanity. It is, perhaps, significant that when he read The Pilgrim's Progress he said : " The state- ments here are interesting, but tough." That was his attitude to most " tough " things—to be cynical almost
to the point of genius. To be good is noble," says Pudd'nhead Wilson. " But to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble."
And 'yet there is huckleberry Finn and at least half of Life on the Mississippi—all lovely and all real. One should read The Ordeal of Mark Twain if only to see how it was possible, by the grace of God, for these pure pearls to be saved from the corrosive of a cynic born without a will. It is a book, too, which, in the catch-phrase, should be in the hands of every author—" There but for the grace of God go I " ; every wife—" Heaven guard my husband from me ! " ; and every reviewer who feels inclined to throw around such names as Cervantes, Voltaire, or Edgar Allan Poe.
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