The Lion and the Uniform
In The Ordeal of Mark Twain Van Wyck Brooks studies the tragedy which he sees in the career of a genius who was born with the nature of a great artist but born into an environment so uncongenial to art that he had to struggle against it all his life, and vainly, except for a few radiant occasions when he escaped it rather by accident than by any natural sense of his best direction or any wisdom which he had been able to acquire. In “that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle-West of ours,” according to Mr. Brooks, where in Mark Twain’s boyhood and youth the frontier had not yet lightened the hand of death which it always laid upon every uncomplacent urge toward art or creativeness or even distinction, Mark Twain had a smaller opportunity for free growth than he would have had on “the fertile human soil of any spot in Europe.” Moreover, not only his general environment but the individual who touched him most intimately contrived, however unwittingly, to clip and bind his instinctive wings. His mother, keen, spry, witty, energetic, but hungry for the love she had missed in her marriage and therefore insatiate in her maternal passions, checked all the impulses in her sensitive son which looked to her like eccentricities and tenderly hammered him into the only mould tolerated in Missouri—the mould of respectability and amiability. That he did not quite stay hammered is testimony to the strength of his desire, but it was never to become fully conscious. So, though his episode on the river as pilot partly liberated him, for there he had a craft and an authority which he never had anywhere else in his life, he was capable of relapsing again into the temper and texture of the herd when he drifted to the still wilder frontier of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast. There, where any affection for privacy seemed a contempt for society and any differentiation from the crowd seemed almost an insult to it, Mark Twain had no choice, if he was to express himself and still be respectable and amiable, but to express himself in the permitted idiom of the humourist. “Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast. Plainly, also, the humourist was a type that pioneer society required in order to maintain its psychical equilibrium.” Laughter was the only ultimate weapon in the desperate battle with the wilderness. “Women laughed,” as Albert Bigelow Paine phrases it, “that they might not weep; men when they could no longer swear.”
That such laughter was heroic, Mr. Brooks, a humane critic, would admit, but he is too ardently, too fiercely, a partisan of the divine right of the creative impulse to feel that Mark Twain’s submission to such laughter was less than deeply tragic. And when the first harvests of fame released this Pacific humourist from his humorous prison, what had he to turn to? Nothing, Mr. Brooks answers, but the Gilded Age of our Reconstruction madness, when the entire nation, with a fearful homogeneity, was out money-hunting as it had never been before; when natural resources hitherto unsuspected were being tapped, and such sparse resources of the soul as had existed here and there under the régime of our ancient culture were being deserted, almost as obviously as were those stony farms which the most alive natives of New England were leaving to the shiftless men and hesitant, half-alive virgins who had to carry on the stock and the traditions.
Into this desiccating atmosphere Mark Twain came just when its best spiritual oxygen had all been pumped out. Too insecure in his own standards not to defer to those of the established East, he took the standards of the first persons under whose influence he fell. There was his wife, who had been brought up in Elmira, in “up-state” New York, where a “stagnant, fresh water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths or two and a quarter generations deep, densely provincial, resting on a basis of angular sectarianism, eviscerated politics, and raw money, ruled the roost, imposing upon all the rest of society its own type, forcing all to submit to it or to imitate it.” Mark Twain submitted and imitated, with the result that he, who had in himself the makings of a sans-culotte, became in most outward ways a pillar of society, and he who was built to be a Rabelais of loud, large, exuberant satire, became instead a writer quite safe (with a few furtively obscene exceptions, such as “1601”) for the domestic fireside and the evening lamp. And not only his wife was to blame. There was William Dean Howells, whom Boston, lacking any such energetic blood of its own in those decaying days, had had to import from Ohio, but who without serious struggle accepted the spinsterly principles of Boston, decided that “the more smiling aspects of life are the more American,” and, as regards Mark Twain, tamed him with the doctrines of a timid gentility and a surface realism. Once handcuffed between these two good and gentle captors, Mark Twain was lost. Instead of satirizing the United States as he was born to do, he satirized medieval France and England and generally the great, deep past of Europe, thereby actually multiplying the self-congratulations of which his countrymen had already too much the habit. Instead of telling the truth about contemporary life, which he had the eyes to see, he kept a thousand silences on matters about which he could not say what he saw and thought without hurting the feelings of his friends—that is, the privileged class. Instead of building some precious edifice of beauty that might dare the sun and shake the very spheres, as great beauty does, he was content to laugh at beauty or at least at those exceptional creatures who follow it into paths that to duller men seem vague or ridiculous. Poor Mark Twain, Mr. Brooks in effect concludes, he was born to be a master and creator, but he died having never been anything but the victim of his epoch—the “saddest, most ironical figure,” the playboy of the Western World.
No briefer summary could do justice to a book in many respects so novel as this and no bare outline of Mr. Brooks’s argument could afford to be less uncompromising, for he himself is uncompromising in his general arraignment of the industrial civilization and the uncompleted culture which could hold Mark Twain down and of the qualities in his character which allowed him to be held. That it is an arraignment, however, and exhibits instances of special pleading and a definite animus must be admitted even by those who, like myself, agree that the picture here drawn of our greatest humourist is substantially accurate as well as brilliant. Let me cite some examples. Mark Twain once proposed a conundrum, “Why am I like the Pacific Ocean?” and himself answered it: “I don’t know. I was just asking for information.” “If he had not had a certain sense of colossal force,” comments Mr. Brooks, “it would never have occurred to him, however humorously, to compare... his magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean.” It will not do to take the commentator here as seriously as he takes Mark Twain. Again, speaking of the instinct for protective coloration which led Mark Twain, with the other humorists, to adopt a pen-name, Mr. Brooks finds it an “interesting coincidence that ‘Mark Twain,’ in the pilot’s vocabulary, implied ‘safe water.’” Interesting indeed, but totally insignificant, though Mr. Brooks by mentioning it makes it look like a tiny aspersion on Mark Twain’s courage. And once more, this passage with regard to Huckleberry Finn, in which for once its author seems to Mr. Brooks to have slipped out of the silken net of which Mrs. Clemens held the drawstrings and the golden cage to which Mr. Howells held the key, and floated freely and gloriously down the Mississippi on a raft, essentially disguised as the joyful, illiterate, vagabond Huck. “That Mark Twain was almost if not quite conscious of his opportunity we can see from his introductory note to the book: ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’ He feels so secure of himself that he can actually challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive!” With the aid of psychoanalysis one can find motives for any burst of mirth, but this explanation singularly recalls O. Henry’s remark about a certain husband whose wife was trying to provoke him to beat her so they could have the fun and luxury of making up: “Many ideas were far from his mind, but the farthest was the idea of beating his wife.”
One thing that makes me suspect at times the general drift of Mr. Brooks’s argument is that a good many of the details of his psychoanalyzing look suspicious. Read in cold blood the account of the effect upon Mark Twain’s subsequent life of his promises to his mother on the occasion of his father’s death: “Already,” we are told, “he was ‘broken down’ by his father’s death: remorse had ‘laid a heavy hand on him.’ But what was this remorse; what had he done for grief or shame? ‘A hundred things in themselves trifling,’ which had offended in reality not his father’s heart, but his father’s will, as a conventional citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family in his own likeness. Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings—out of this moody child, the first wavering steps of the soul; that is what they have really been, these peccadilloes, the dawn of the artist. And the formidable promptings of love tell him that they are sin! He is broken down indeed: all those crystalline fragments of individuality, still so tiny and so fragile, are suddenly shattered; his nature, wrought upon by the tense heat of that hour, has become again like soft wax. And his mother stamps there, with awful ceremony, the composite image of her own meagre traditions. He is to go forth the Good Boy by force majeure, he is to become such a man as his father would have approved of, he is to retrieve his father’s failure, to recover the lost gentility of his family that had once been proud, to realize that ’mirage of wealth’ that had ever hung before his father’s eyes. And to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly with his bread and butter, he is to keep strictly within the code, to remember the maxims of Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and all the conventions; above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any fanciful orbit of his own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away childish things, Sam Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always a child, your mother’s child!” Are eleven-year-old boys, even boys of genius, really ever made over so sharply as this? Mr. Brooks says “we feel with irresistible certitude that Mark Twain’s fate was once for all decided there.” I wonder if this is not the “irresistible certitude” of those romancers and evangelists who believe in instantaneous and irrevocable conversions. Barbarous and dangerous a thing as it is for parents to exact promises from their children under the pressure of bitter events, still it is rarely as bad as all that.
The point is strained again when Mr. Brooks digs around the roots of Mark Twain’s “obsession of animosity against the novels of Jane Austen” and traces it to an “indirect venting of his hatred of the primness and priggishness of his own entourage.” More specifically, in his submerged self he hated his wife and Howells. “When Mark Twain utters such characteristic aphorisms as ‘Heaven for climate, hell for society,’ we see the repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs. Clemens and the Rev. Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant Mark Twain called, and with reason, for he seems to have been the most lovable of men, ‘a companionship which to me stands first after Livy’s [his wife’s].’ Similarly, when he roars and rages against the novels of Jane Austen we can see that buried self taking vengeance upon Mr. Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a prime passion, who had even taken Jane Austen as a model.” Now, of course, when the psychoanalytic hunt is on it seems unsubtle and unsympathetic to object, with common sense, that our antipathies are often accidental and that often enough we whimsically specialize in this or that antipathy, seeing how many angles we can hate it from, in how many slashing phrases we can utter a distaste which has grown into a habit that is positively a delight. But even if we do not lean too heavily on common sense and are merely rival psychoanalysts we must still admit that in Freud’s house are many mansions and that every genius analyzed has so many roots each of them may look like the tap-root, though only one can actually be.
Without for a moment denying Mr. Brooks the credit of being the first critic to dig importantly about the roots of an American man of genius, and indeed of making clear much that was not clear before, I still think he has reduced Mark Twain too neatly to the dualistic formula. For all this critic’s learning and research and penetration, he does not quite give the effect of having been and seen entirely around the subject of his study. Just in proportion as Mark Twain was stupendously casual, as wasteful as nature in his processes, not always purposive at all but a rioter in whims and unprophesiable explosions, an amateur of the drifting life, Mr. Brooks appears to have missed him, because he misses there what he conceives to be “the mind of the mature artist, which is all of a single flood, all poise, all natural control.” As in his earlier study of John Addington Symonds, Mr. Brooks is rigorously monistic—almost monotheistic—in his conception of the creative life, so rigorously that he has come to see any sort of dualism in an artist’s nature as not only the chief of tragedies but indeed as the chief of sins against his function and destiny. Ibsen felt that way about it and so did Milton on somewhat different grounds, but Molière and Shakespeare, if they had thought much about the matter, would pretty certainly have laid the emphasis much nearer the tragedy than the sin. And even whatever tragic aspect there might be would be somewhat relieved for them, I suspect, as King Lear by its poetry, by such an abundance of life as Mark Twain had and tasted. Is it merely being deceived by quantity to feel that Mr. Brooks, so avidly exigent as regards quality, limits too narrowly his judgments as regards the creative process and its achievements, and by despising quantity overlooks some quality too? At least I am persuaded that Mr. Brooks has taken the vast figure of Mark Twain, both fact and myth, and has recreated it too near his own image, making the Mark Twain of his re-creation suffer more both in his submerged and his dominant selves than the originally created Mark Twain did by reason of the turbulent confusion of his career. Mr. Brooks, sparer, more clear-cut, more conscious, would thus have suffered if he had walked such a fraying path.
If I take too many exceptions to this account of the, “ordeal” of Mark Twain it is because I believe it to be a book worthy the most scrupulous consideration. Side by side with the vulgar myth of Mark Twain I foresee that this interpretation of him will take its place for a long time to come, correcting the other, pleasing the judicious by its general truthfulness and its felicitous language, even invading the textbooks and becoming classic. I think it should do these things, but I hope it will also be perceived to be, something after the manner of, say, Voltaire’s Lettres Anglaises, a clever tract, another resounding shot in the warfare which Mr. Brooks is waging on behalf of the leadership of letters. Herein he has set forth the career of a man of letters who should have been leader and was not, with implications on every vivid page as to why and how others may take warnings from his failure. “Has the American writer of today the same excuse for missing his vocation?” Mr. Brooks concludes. “‘He must be very dogmatic or unimaginative,’ says John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has ceased to be prophetic, ‘who would affirm that man will never weary of the whole system of things which reigns at present.... We never know how near we are to the end of any phase of our experience, and often, when its seeming stability begins to pall upon us, it is a sign that things are about to take a new turn.’ Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confrères have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask yourself whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as poets do.”