Chapter II: • The Culture of the Seventies (3)

This earliest backwoods humor had been done in realistic colors and bears the impress of authenticity. But the school that succeeded--John Phoenix, Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby--quickly conventionalized its technique, relying on burlesque, tall lying, distorted spelling, genial philosophy. The picaresque strain was softened and perverted by deliberate human-interest touches--a better case must be made out for the untutored children of nature. It was this humor that Mark Twain inherited, and he enriched it with a wealth dug from his own large and generous nature. An incorrigible idealist, as all great humorists must be, he recreated some of the earlier types, translating Colonel Simon Suggs into Colonel Sellers, and Ransy Sniffle into Huck Finn. It was a glorious transformation, but the result lacked something of the soiled reality of the earlier blackguards. Yet underneath his idealism was a generous deposit of the common mud of life. The spirit of Mike Fink was never far from Mark Twain. It haunted him like an evil genius, refusing to be exorcised by Olivia Clemens, and it found vent in sly literary sprees that begot offspring to be handed about furtively and chuckled over by the sons of Adam; but for the most part it was kept in strict subjection to the proprieties of Elmira and Hartford.

_Roughing It_ and _The Gilded Age_ are brilliant complementary pictures of the gaudy frontier spirit that was washing in upon the staid realm of the genteel, to the vast concern of such genteelists as Thomas Bailey Aldrich. The former is a buoyant chronicle of the West of Captain Carver and Wild Bill Hickok, the West of the Pony Express, the Comstock lode, the bad man and the lynch law, a land of young men in red flannel shirts, heavy boots, and six-shooters, who feared neither God nor the devil. Bret Harte in San Francisco first realized the literary possibilities of this picturesque world, and his tales of life in the mining-camps were received with a shout of approval. But Bret Harte had never been a miner. He was not realist enough, nor honest enough, to portray the West in its stark, grotesque reality. He was only a literary middleman who skillfully purveyed such wares as his eastern readers wanted. In consequence he coated his tales with a sentimental picaresque--pandered to the common taste by discovering nuggets of pure gold in the dregs and outcasts of the mining-camps. But Mark Twain was too honest for that. He had been a part of the flush times and had seen the economic process work itself out. He had seen the grub-stake prospector succeeded by the wild-cat speculator, and him in turn followed by the eastern capitalist. He had seen the mining frontier become a thing of the past in a single decade, with the Comstock lode in the hands of competent exploiters and the pick-and-shovel miners plunging deeper into the mountains to pursue their feverish hopes. From that experience he had learned a lesson he was to carry East with him. “Because we judged that we had learned,” he said, “the real secret of success in silver mining, which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to _sell_ the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining.”[577]

It was the great lesson of his generation, and thus instructed he proposed to sell his brains in the best market. Exploitation was the royal road to wealth and he was eager to exploit both himself and his fellows. Yet not all of Mark Twain was thus eager. Deep in his heart was another Mark Twain, the artist, the chivalrous lover of justice, the simple child puzzled at life--and this Mark Twain was already plotting treason against the exploiting Mark Twain. For the first time this deeper self got out of hand in _The Gilded Age_. As he contemplated the common scoundrelism at Washington and elsewhere, his anger exuded in scathing satire. He hated the dirty thing, yet he seems never to have realized that such scoundrelism was only the backwash of the spirit of exploitation and that he himself was riding on its waves. With the soap-bubble dreams of Colonel Sellers he dealt lovingly, for he was sketching his own origins; the Colonel and the Hawkinses were his own flesh and blood and the Tennessee lands were an old investment about which the family dreams of wealth had been woven for years. He delighted in the Colonel’s childlike faith that prosperity only awaited a vote of Congress--with adequate appropriations, of course. He asked no questions about unearned increment; to question that would have been treason to the frontier philosophy. So into Colonel Sellers he put all that was naïve and lovable in the Gilded Age. But Senator Dillworthy was another matter. Hypocrite and corruptionist, he was laying obscene hands on sacred things, betraying his high trust for sordid ends. Mark Twain hated graft--the word had not been coined but the ugly thing was there--and with the innocence of his generation he damned the agent and overlooked the principal. It was not his fault. The economics of history was a closed book to Americans of the seventies, and even Henry Adams in his analysis of the current corruption in his novel _Democracy_ was no better than a mole nosing blindly underground.

He had opened another door to his genius and discovered the satirist. There lay the real Mark Twain. But the wares of the satirist were not in demand at the barbecue, so he closed the door and fell to purveying what the public wanted. _Tom Sawyer_ was in part a malicious thrust at the Sunday School tale, and in part a whimsical pronouncement of the natural rights of the small boy. But it is in _Huckleberry Finn_--the one great picaresque tale of the frontier--that the western philosophy of Mark Twain, a philosophy that derives straight from the old naturistic school, crops out most sharply. It is a drama of the struggle between the individual and the village _mores_, set in a loose picturesque framework, and exemplifying the familiar thesis that the stuff of life springs strong and wholesome from the great common stock. Huck Finn is a child of nature who has lived close to the simple facts of life, unperverted by the tyrannies of the village that would make a good boy of him. He had got his schooling from the unfenced woods, from the great river that swept past him as he idly fished, from the folk-tales of negroes and poor whites, from queer adventures with Tom Sawyer; and from such experiences he had got a code of natural ethics. Then he found himself on the raft with Jim the runaway nigger, and his little pagan soul felt the stirrings of the problem of right and wrong. The village code and the natural code clashed and the conflict was terrifying. The village code warned him that hell yawned for one who helped a slave escape, and the human code warned him that betrayal was a blackguardly thing. With the fear of hell upon him he wrote to Miss Watson, and then his sense of the kindliness of Jim, the honest humanity under the black skin, rose up in fierce protest.

It was a close place. I took [the letter] up, and held it in my
hands. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever,
betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied for a minute, sort
of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll _go_ to hell”--and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let
them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.[578]

It was a triumph over the sacred tribal law of conformity--the assertion of the individual will in opposition to society--and it reveals the heart of Mark Twain’s philosophy. The rebel Huck is no other than the rebel Mark Twain whose wrath was quick to flame up against the unrighteous customs and laws of caste. If men were only honest realists--that is, if they were men and not credulous fools--how quickly the stables might be cleansed and life become decent and humane. If only the good brains could be segregated and trained in a real “man-factory,” the history of civilization might become something the angels need not weep over as they read it. It all comes back to an honest realism that in accepting fact will clear away the superstitious fogs in which men have floundered and suffered hitherto. The one sacred duty laid on every rational being is the duty of rebellion against sham--to deny the divinity of clothes, to thrust out quack kings and priests and lords, to refuse a witless loyalty to things. This creed of the rebel is written all through Mark Twain’s later work, edging his satire and lending an Emersonian note to his individualism. In such a passage as this it emerges sharply:

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to
its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real
thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing
to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are
extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear
out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the
body from winter, disease, death. To be loyal to rags, to shout
for rags, to worship rags--that is a loyalty to unreason, it is
pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy;
let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution
declares “that all political power is inherent in the people, and
all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted
for their benefit; and that they have _at all times_ an undeniable
and indefeasible right to _alter their form of government_ in such
manner as they may think expedient.”

Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the
commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his
peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a
traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay,
does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is
the duty of others to vote him down if they do not see the matter
as he does.[579]

In the Middle Ages clothes-worship had been exalted to a religion, he believed, and he turned with gusto to reply to the aristocratic romanticism of Sir Walter, who, delighting in the picturesque company gathered in the great hall, forgot to penetrate to the _oubliettes_--is not the word commentary enough on the ways of the seigneur?--where nameless wretches were rotting under the walls of the castle. He had small patience with the cult of medievalism that was turning such men as Henry Adams and William Morris back to the Middle Ages as to their lost home. He had the frontier contempt for medieval ways, and for the _ancien régime_ that was the last rags of the Middle Ages. 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!

Footnotes

[527] _The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, University of California Chronicle_, Vol. XIII, Number 4.

[528] _Poetical Works_, Vol. I, p. 45.

[529] “At the Funeral of a Minor Poet,” _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 94.

[530] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, p. 215.

[531] _Ibid._, p. 200.

[532] _Poetical Works_, Vol. II, p. 72.

[533] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, pp. 168-169.

[534] _Ibid._, p. 176.

[535] _Ibid._, p. 205.

[536] Fred Lewis Pattee, _The Development of the American Short Story_, pp. 171-172. See the entire chapter for a discussion of early realism in the _Atlantic_.

[537] Preface, p. 5.

[538] Chapter VIII, p. 183.

[539] Chapter IX, p. 100.

[540] _Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett_, pp. 46-47.

[541] _Ibid._, pp. 38-39.

[542] _Ibid._, pp. 186-187.

[543] _Ibid._, p. 23.

[544] Chapter XXXV, p. 350.

[545] Chapter LVII, pp. 519-520.

[546] _Ibid._, p. 563.

[547] See Mabbott, _Short Stories by Walt Whitman_, Columbia University Press, 1927.

[548] For his late views see Horace Traubel, _With Walt Whitman in Camden_, Vol. I, p. 99, and elsewhere.

[549] Cleveland Rogers and John Black, _The Gathering of the Forces_, Vol. I, p. 12.

[550] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 53, 54, 57.

[551] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 215.

[552] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 65.

[553] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 79-80.

[554] _Leaves of Grass_, inclusive edition ed. by Emory Halloway, Garden City, N. Y., 1927. Hereafter called _Leaves_. “To the States,” p. 8.

[555] _Ibid._, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” p. 297, ll. 21-23.

[556] Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_, p 171.

[557] _Ibid._, p. 172.

[558] _Leaves_, “One’s-Self I Sing,” p. 1, ll. 1-2.

[559] _Autobiographia_, p. 73. See also _Democratic Vistas_, p. 74.

[560] _Leaves_, “Roaming in Thought,” p. 233.

[561] “Carlyle from the American Point of View,” in _Specimen Days, Prose Works_, pp. 174-175.

[562] Rourke, _op. cit._, p. 173.

[563] _Leaves_, “Starting from Paumanok,” p. 14, ll. 22-26; p. 15, ll. 1, 13, 19, 22-23; p. 16, ll. 2, 5-11; p. 17, ll. 7-10.

[564] _Leaves_, p. 349, ll. 18-19.

[565] _Leaves_, p. 43, ll. 9-17.

[566] _Democratic Vistas, Prose Works_, pp. 254-255.

[567] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 174.

[568] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 285.

[569] _Leaves_, “Song of the Broad Axe,” p. 160, ll. 7, 14-20, 21-22; p. 161, ll. 1-2, 6-7, 10.

[570] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 101.

[571] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 193, 215.

[572] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 223.

[573] _Ibid._ Vol. I, p. 363.

[574] See Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_, pp. 211-222; Lucy Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, pp. 170-177.

[575] _Leaves_, “Thanks in Old Age,” p. 435.

[576] Lucy Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, p. 223.

[577] Vol. I, Chapter XXXIII, p. 237.

[578] Chapter 31.

[579] _The Connecticut Yankee_, N. Y., 1917, p. 107.

[580] _Ibid._, Chapter XIII, pp. 105-106.

[581] Cf. Whitman’s view, _The Gathering of the Forces_, Vol. II, pp. 284-286.

[582] See Chapter 33.

[583] W. D. Howells, _My Mark Twain_, p. 43.

[584] _Joan of Arc_, Chapter 37, p. 290.

[585] _The Mysterious Stranger_, p. 151.